"Ken S. Tucker" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g17g2000prg.googlegroups.com:
[snip]
>>
>> As always: Follow The money. Therein lies the truth - look at who got
>> taken to the cleaners and who got filthy stinking rich. Does anyone
>> *really* think that someone who had a *guaranteed* severance package of
>> 40- 50 *million* bucks was going to give a good gawddam whether their
>> laissez- faire wild-west practices might wipe out a bunch of mere peons
>> any more than Haliburton gives a damn whether taxpayers are paying
>> billions while Iraq simply invests its oil income?
>>
>> This wasn't done because The Powers That Be were generously trying to
>> help limited-income people buy homes; paying the downpayment for them
>> outright would have worked fine. No, the regulations and laws were
>> gutted because the sharks smelled prey in the water, and the moment
>> blood was drawn, teh feeding-frenzy ensued.
>
> Back in the 70's I worked as a Life Agent for
> Prudential, and was required to pass an ethics
> exam. The client was required to understand
> the contract they were buying, and I would often
> make notes and graphs to demo the plan. It was
> a "no-brainer".
Yup. The thing is that, by protecting the potential client, the company also protected itself. "Enightened self-interest" so to speak.
It was three strike rule, regulated by the industry
> to preserve it's own reputation, 3 complaints and
> they'd consider lifting your license, it was all good
> plain common sense and honesty.
Exactly. And all in all, it's just plain easier to work that way - if you always go with your best estimate of truth given the information you have, and behave ethically, you don't have to worry about protecting secrets or lies. It's a lot harder to remember what lies one has told to whom, than it is to simply be truthful and ethical as possible.
That's what baffles me - the amount of unnecessary complexity and stress that people inject into their lives. It's as tho' they need stuff to be frenetic about. IMO, life is stresful enough without adding in unnecessary stress.
Maybe things have changed, but I've always placed
> my reputation and my employers-colleagues at a
> premium because at one time that was valued.
> Ken
>
I was going to say "I don't know what's happened to people", but the depressing thing is that I think I do know...
" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@b1g2000hsg.googlegroups.com:
Well, (1) it's boring, (2) has all been said before, and (3) not to be rude, pardon my bluntness (I'm quite tired/weary, and in pain today) but pls inform: are you interested in the opinion, or just looking for an excuse for contention?
In 1913 late on Christmas eve, 3 US senators, after the rest of the senate had gone home, passed a law that created the unconstitutional Federal Reserve system. The Federal Reserve is not a government entity. It is a private banking cartel. This private company was granted the power to counterfeit money and then loan it with interest back to the the US government. That same year the income tax was passed so that the government would have a way to raise the money to pay the interest to the private bank on counterfeited money it borrows. As things stand today 100% of the money that you pay in income tax goes to pay the interest on the debt to the Federal Reserve. Not one single penny goes to provide a government service.
I realize this sounds almost too bizarre to be true but it is. The banking cartels motivation is that it gets paid enormous sums of money as interest on money that it just counterfeits. The governments motivation is that politicians can stay in office by promising goodies to the citizens and not pay for it by raising taxes, but by having the Fed counterfeit money. This counterfeiting lowers the value of everyones money (inflation) and is nothing more and nothing less than a hidden tax on the citizens, but since they are too dumb to know this they don't revolt. As Henry Ford said: "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@m3g2000hsc.googlegroups.com:
Ah. Sorry to have been cranky; was coming off an oppiosite thing - "tell me what you think about [some situation]", "I thnk X", "You f*ing g*dd*mn sh*t-sucking idiot moron, who the F* do you think you are blahblahblah..." "Hey, *you* asked *me*, remember?" "F* you a-hole blahblahblah!"
Arrgh.
ANyhoo:
WHat's happened to poeple. You wrote:
Counterfeit money...?
In essence, yes, tho' I wouldn't say "counterfeit", I'd prob not say "cartel" (for various reasons that are really neither here nor there). I don't really know enought about the Federal REserve to elaborate on what you worte, other than that it seems to mesh with what I recall.
OK, two sections. First is the technicla background stuff, second is "what's happened to people".
Background
--------------------------------------------------------- One of the major roots of today's mess was dispensing with the Gold Standard (which IIRC, but check!, I think Nixon did because he didn't have enough $$ to pay for what he was doing in Viet Nam, so he eliminated teh Gold backing of the dollar so that he could, so to speak, make more prettily-printed pieces of paper).
Fannie and Freddi have a long history, but: banking was deregulated in the 1980's, leading eventually to the Savings'n'Loan Crisis (see also "Keating Five"); Phil Graham in 1999 slipped through what's called "the Enron Loophole" (
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), and pushed, after 1000, for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (
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Existing laws re; naked shorts were ignored (
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), and the SEC killed the uptick rule in July of 2007 (
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).
Additionally, (
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) QUOTED MATERIAL: "The mortgage broker industry is regulated by 10 federal laws, five federal enforcement agencies and over 49 state laws or licensing boards. ... The banks have used brokers to outsource the job of finding and qualifying borrowers, and also to outsource some of the liabilities for fraud and foreclosure onto the originators through legal agreements." This last point has separated the banks and other financial institutions that eventually end up owing th eloan, and the sales people who earn big fat commissions for granting as many mortgages as possible - meaning, the brokers have Zero responsibility (and suffer *no* consequences) for granting bad mortgages, whereas the financial institutions end up (and eventually, We The Sheeple) holding the proverbial bag.
What's happened to People
----------------------------------------------------------- As I see it (since I've been observing and thinking about these things for a ong time), ther are a couple of sociocultural tendenceis which, IMO hve become endemic:
(1) the entire concept of "American Values" became completely distorted - what used to be 'putting in an honest day's work so as to have a decent life' became 'flash is superior to cash', IOW, the goal was not a decent life, but the *appearance* of a *waealthy* life, and people increasingly spent, and then took loans (i.e. credit) to obtain, the *trappings* of wealth - so someone who didn't have $100 worth of savings would nevertheless have the "social status" gained by the appearance of wealth, (2) increasing indulgence (not the same as love) of children's every demand and tantrum which in turn gave rise to theories of "child-centrered education" that said any and all discipline, including basic disciplines such as learning to *spell*, was evil becuase it "stifled creativity".
1 + 2 = 3, with (3) being the loss of an ethical center, becasue teh "greatest good" mutated from meaning "the ideals upon which the nation was founded", to meaning noting more than the phrase "If it feels good, do it", and what felt good included absurd degrees of self-indulgence - and when self-indulgence is the ultimate good, things like laws, theft, lack of ethics, harming others, and just generally not giving a rat's posterior about anyone or anything other than one's own desire-of-the-moment are seen as nothing more than "justifiabel" and even "exxpected/desireable" means to that ultimate end of self-indulgnce. FOr some people, this mean raping investors by manipulating the stock market; for otehrs, it meant falsifying info on mortgages so as to get it to pass and get one's commission, and to hell with teh consequences; for toerhs it meant taking on a mortgge that could bnever be paid off with the intention of palming the hosue onto some other sucker who was expected to pay waaaay moer for the house than that for which it was purchased; and for others, it simply means behaving like a whining spoiled emotionally-imamture dumbass whose mere existence supposedly "entitles" the lazy butthead to having every wish fulfilled, and who then becomes completely sullen or a criminal, or a downright psychopath, out of "resentment" that every wish is not fulfilled.
So that is, in a very tiny nutshell, the essence of what I think has happened. Too many peole stopped giving a hoot about laws and ethics, so some became ripoff artists, others tried to game the system because they thought themselves waaay more clever than they actually were, otehrs just flop around whining about their puny woes and not caring about anything and not doing anything at all creative or constructive.
And so on. Summation: rejection of any sense of personal responsibility, or even simple civility and common sense.
In the end, the proverbial chickens are now coming home to roost, and a lot of people are doing nothing mroe than trying to blame others while avoiding being blamed. And looking for an easy way out.
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