septimus, you’re trying to surgically reconstruct your point now to be reasonable (though I do notice the admission that there was at least slight exaggeration). Anyone who applauded Enron’s profits as self-evidently admirable did not do so with the knowledge (or at least admitting the knowledge) of any accounting trickery or “gouging.” That’s where your point jumped the rails.
Perhaps they were delusional, but I would speculate (since neither of us feels inclined to Google) that some number of people very close to zero (if not zero) acknowledged trickery and exploitation and applauded it. You said, “…it is only the right-wing that dotes on the wealth of a Skilling or Madoff as commendable in itself,” a statement without qualification. Which is ridiculous on its face. As I said previously, the population of people who applauded Madoff’s and Skilling’s methods (knowing what those methods were) is, well, zero.
Now you say your real point was that some people called out Enron for shenanigans at the same time others were applauding their profits. So what? At that point there was no consensus, so an implication that people applauded profits whatever the methods is dishonest, since that certainly was not the case. I will suggest again that once the facts were out in the open and largely beyond debate, there was a conspicuous lack of cheerleaders. So, again, the bogeymen you selected were in support of a straw man. Any form of “whatever produces a profit is okay with conservatives, there is no limit with these guys” is simpleminded, demonizing nonsense.
And I notice you left Madoff right out of the discussion. Why is that?
Maybe. But my point still stands, I think. He invoked Skilling and Madoff as scary monsters embraced by conservatives. That article does suggest some people questioned Enron’s story. Others did not. For septimus’s point to make sense, people would had to have bought McLean’s concerns, thought them valid, and hand-waved them away as not relevant since Enron was still making money.
You miss the point. You’re speaking to investor’s understanding of Enron’s imminent fall circa 2001. I was addressing the mischievous ways Enron made money during its profitable phase in the 1990’s. I’m no expert analyst, but the mischief and trickery was obvious to me just reading NY Times in late 1990’s. It must have also been apparent to the analysts touting and applauding the Enron management.
With Shanasty Just incanting “Madoff … Madoff … Madoff”, and I striving in vain to find a way for him to grasp my point, I’m afraid the spectators are getting lost.
Let’s back up. Many of the politico-economic discussions here deal with the social utility of personal wealth accumulation.
At one end we have “Profits are a tax on labor” – a perspective that might make even Karl Marx cringe. (I didn’t even click on that thread, pretty sure both sides would be erroneous and I wouldn’t know where to start. )
At the other end, we have some who seem to believe that the mystical properties of Free Market ensure that accumulated wealth will always reflect value created. (Many would except heroin dealers and fraudsters like Madoff, but without noting a slippery slope: Enron was profitable through mischief. IANAL, and don’t know if the mischief was prosecutable. Would prosecutability suddenly change their mischievous profits from 100% earned to 0%, like Madoff’s or a heroin dealer’s?)
And I’ve seen quotes by rightist thinkers that wealth should be protected however it’s earned. I recall a GWB quote where that was implicit; unfortunately I have no bookmarks for such, beyond the one I’ve already mentioned: Forbes defended illegal behavior if it was by tax evaders rather than “criminals.”
I have a middlish perspective. Some wealth rewards created value; some doesn’t. I hinted at this perspective in this post:
I also wrote:
Shagnasty ignores my perspective – we’ve no clue if he thinks it’s valid overall or not – and repeats “Madoff … Madoff … Madoff” wanting me to admit (again since I have once already) that that extremity is harder to substantiate.
If I withdraw the Madoff allegation entirely, will you address substance? Or declare victory and put me back on Ignore? :rolleyes:
As are most of your posts. Ever thought of trying something new?
BTW, did you ever find the cite I asked for re: your false claim about the Standard Oil monopoly? (I may have to add you to my "Libertarians take Liberties with the truth " thread.)
This is somewhat confusing. I personally attended my local Occupy gatherings, and am in touch with others in various locales. Don’t recall much at all about Bernie Madoff and Enron being a focus of attention. Which ones were you at, Strato, that led you to your position of intimate and abundant information about what Occupy was all about?
U.S. accuses Bank of America of mortgage-backed securities fraud
I could fill the page with such links, you could too, if you cared to. Could probably rack up about fifty of them without seeing any reference to Enron and Madoff.
I sat with a bunch of folks at one sharing stories about just how much of their pension funds disappeared. Well, maybe not “disappeared”, they suspect the money actually went into some people’s pockets. I’ll grant that these are not very sophisticated people, unlike yourself, but then…you weren’t there, were you? You could have explained it all so that they might be content with their new understanding. About how it was all just a big ol’ oopsy-daisy, really, nobody’s fault.
They suspect darkly that in the Halls of Power, banks and other financial institutions are lent sympathetic ears, that their wants and needs are given attention that the rest of us just don’t get. That “financial adviser” doesn’t mean anything that “salesman” doesn’t. That the game used to be broken, but now it is fixed.
Unleash Elizabeth Warren! And I’m not saying that just because she’s so hot!
I haven’t been to any. I also haven’t said I had any knowledge about what OWS is (was?) all about. My eyes rolled at septimus’s suggestion that the Right celebrates those famous do-gooders Madoff and Skilling, on account of they’re rich and all. We dote on them, apparently. Wealthy, you see. If you tell me that those two didn’t come up much at OWS gatherings, I believe you, and I never suggested otherwise.
You’re one of those evil 1%-ers who succeed while the other 99% are just left with the scraps of language. Hell, most of us only get about 30-40 different words to use per day. Fascist.
Easy to remember spelling: It has the very rare property that each vowel occurs exactly once and they occur in alphabetic order! (Use “facetiously” if you consider ’ * y * ’ a vowel.)
This seems to be the explanation from that article.
(CNN webpages, like Washington Post’s take minutes to display on my machine, though I can read the text with control-U. Anyone else have that problem?)
SEC and the DOJ won’t take any of them to court, they simply make them pay a fine and/or admit more wrong doing. For example, JPMorgan Chase was found to be manipulating energy prices in California to the tune of $125 million dollars. Instead of suing JPMorgan Chase, the regulatory body simply fined the bank $410 million - or, in other words, a single day’s income. The financial services industry is a narrow slice of GDP yet finance affects every other industry. The financial industry determines how much we all pay for oil, food, and clothing.
It’s funny, because our criminal justice system will pay lawyers to the teeth to prosecute people for ridiculous crimes. Yet, we have no justice system that goes after the banks. We just give them a small fine and they do the same criminal behavior again.
The OWS movement was transitory but it’ll be back in a vengeance when the next financial crisis hits. Given that before Glass-Steagall, bank failures and crashes every 8-10 years, we’ll be due for other crisis in 2016 - 2018. When that occurs, the good news is that it’ll be the end of an Era of Objectivist Conservatism. The bad news is that a lot of people are going to be poor and suffer because of it.
My analysis of the OWS movement at two years - bwahahahaaahah! Hooo! Haaa! Ohh… god, stop, I can’t take much more.
How many valiant protestors showed up at “ground zero” of the movement in New York today? A couple hundred at most?
Guess the rest finished their 6-year degree plan and had an early shift at Starbucks.
No, they will not “rise with a vengeance” at the next turn of the financial crisis-wheel… There is nobody lined up on their side of the ledger to take the reins and do anything about it because it’s tooooo late. Obama was their Great Lib Hope, and he’s just as much an insider as anyone else you care to name, and there is nobody the insiders are going to let have a shot at running this thing that would make the kind of changes (even a fraction of the changes) the OWS and their sympathizers might want.
I think the biggest error of the Occupy movement was the indefinite occupancy goal itself.
First, it was obviously an illegal act to stay and sleep at most down-town public places overnight in most cities - this set up a battle against the police that was not helpful to the cause, and not related to the issues. Too much energy had to be spent dealing with trespassing and vagrancy type issues. If it had been a regular, once a week protest, I think it would have been more successful and persisted for longer. For the people at the protest it became about being able to stay, and the other issues faded to near nothing. Outside supporters (like me) spent too much energy feeding the occupiers and helping with the stay-at-any-cost goal, and not enough addressing issues. Since I am a Burning man person, and one of our ethics is “Leave No Trace,” most of my energy went toward getting rid of trash so that the event was not leaving a mess. If people went home at night, LNT would have been easier to deal with. I am sure the same is true of some other support issues.
Second, the local (San Diego) occupiers were stuck dealing with a bunch of homeless people who were there for the free food, entertainment, and cover, and otherwise just caused problems. After the first few weeks, when it was down to a core of 20-50 occupiers, most of the trouble came from the homeless people who would have otherwise been more spread out. The drunk and obnoxious people were all the homeless people by the end. I know this because some of my friends were involved until the end of it here in SD.
Also, OWS did not have a cable “news” network, a lot of slightly closeted racists, and some billionaires helping out, like the TEA party did/does.
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