Originally Posted by ratbastid

And you've lived in America HOW long?

Originally Posted by ratbastid

The MARKET will sort itself out. Mom and Pop Homeowner, however, will be well and truly fucked without some sort of protection. I'm not interested in helping failing banks--they buttered their own bread on this one. I'm REAL interested in protecting homeowners from the failure of those banks.

Originally Posted by roachboy

o i don't think the sky is falling. i think this is a massive demonstration of the inadequacy at both the descriptive and normative levels of neoliberalism--markets do not "do" anything--agents within markets, understood as sets of constraints, do things. there is no invisible hand, there is no god at the far end of the invisible hand--there is no rationality that assures adequate or beneficial functioning. this is a self-evident feature of capitalist operations in historical terms---and the only source of information that makes any sense is the history of actually existing capitalism.

capitalism produces crisis as one of its primary features. patterns of regulation emerge to restabilize the system, redirect it, reorient it---these regulation are state-driven in the absence of meaningful political pressure that comes from elsewhere. crisis is then one of the systems principle products as system. it has been like this for much of the history of modern nation-states, much of the history of capitalism--which has never performed as neoliberal market-fundamentalism would have you think---an ideological system that presupposes a wholesale ignorance of history which issues into a wholly metaphysical view of the present.

i would think that ideology should be done now by *any* rational standard.
because this nonsense is a perfect example of what neo-liberalism really does best--generates vast income for the top tier of financial institution, treats responsibility as an externality--and in the end, leaves the public, by way of the state, holding the bag.

Originally Posted by roachboy

btw i think your equation of "social welfare" and "corporate welfare" kind of obscene. we could have it out about this, but in another thread....suffice it to say: "wtf?"