Without taking anything away from your well made points, I don’t believe the claim is supportable either way. We just can never know. However, even merely drawing attention to the potential dangers of an unregulated banking industry in the wake of Clinton’s undoing of Glass-Steagall (well intended but fatally abused) would have had some likely dampening effect on their greed. Back in those days, there was still the possibility that a banker could go to jail for breaking the law.
Put it this way: If even an economic dummy like me could see that what was happening was nuts to the extent that it caused me to sell my home in late 2004 to make a move before the crash, it was certainly obvious to the Bushies. But George the Lesser simply fiddled while Rome burned. I have a hard time believing Gore, whose intelligence is regularly underrated, would have been silent or passive on the matter. Plus he wouldn’t have been distracted by an unnecessary war in Iraq or an extended occupation of Afghanistan.
Well, I confess that I don’t always remember that the ‘19’ refers to 2019 either. Of course, I’m not a counselor to the President appearing on television.
And while I don’t recall taking any biology courses after high school, I do know that developing vaccines/cures isn’t made significantly easier just because the pathogen is in the same family. Probably a little easier (hence the yearly flu vaccines of varying effectiveness), but I’m not certain that we actually have a vaccine/cure for any Covid based disease, do we?
I’m heartened by an encounter I had yesterday morning while I was walking the dog. I ran into a woman that I see frequently walking her dogs. And barely before she could say Good Morning, she was ranting and railing about Trump. She said he wasn’t even human. That anger is spreading, I’m sure.
“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic.”
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Munich Security Conference, 15 February 2020 An infodemic is an over-abundance of information, some accurate and some not that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it. It poses a serious problem for public health since people need this guidance to know what actions to take to protect themselves and others, and help mitigate the impact of a disease. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the infodemic is exacerbated by the global scale of the emergency, and propagated by the interconnected way that information is disseminated and consumed through social media platforms and other channels. While the infodemic is a major challenge to outbreak response, it presents an opportunity to identify and adapt new preparedness and response tools.
The problem with this view is that it was George W. Bush who appointed ALL FIVE of the SEC commissioners who made that 2004 rule change.
It’s highly unlikely that a President Gore would have appointed those same ‘let 'er rip, who cares about the consequences of loosening the old restrictions!’ people to the Commission.
So in the alternative history in which the SCOTUS did not hand Bush the Presidency, it’s quite possible that we would have averted the Great Recession.
List of members and their appointment terms:
This is where we need the Deep State. We know that legally, he can’t actually sign the check as the payer; his name will go in the memo section. So some programmer should arrange it so the memo section says: “This check was delayed a week in order to affix the signature of DONALD J. TRUMP.”
I have friends across the country who have never been politically aware in their whole lives. They can’t stop watching the dumpster fire now, and they are pissed. Some of these folks rarely voted, let alone got activist. That’s all changed now.
There is a smouldering fury across the land at what Trump has done to us. People understand we must make a change. Like you, I’m heartened. Which isn’t to say we can stop doing every single thing we can. We must all be Wisconsinites in 2020.
Sherrerd, I didn’t know this. Thank you for the granular information. It is a very important point to make in the alternative history missive.
And you are right. Gore would never have made those appointments.
People forget that the smash 'n grab of our tax dollars got well underway with Bush II, with what at that time seemed like outrageous tax cuts in a time of war, giveaway contracts to Halliburton and others in the war-making biz… and of course to all their banking buddies on Wall Street.
How quaint these vagaries seem today by comparison, eh?
More governors joining the mutineers. This time it’s Midwestern governors who are banding together to discuss re-opening the economy. No mention of asking Capt. Bligh, er, Trump’s permission to do anything.
The Individual 1 administration issued a no-bid contract for $55 million to make N95 masks to a company that has no employees, has been in bankruptcy since 2018, and doesn’t manufacture anything.
I’ve said before that the biggest priority the Democrats need to work on if they win this year is voting rights. We need to break down the system of the Republicans manipulating elections.
In the first place, Fuckface von Clownstick earned the nomination with somewhere around a third of the Republican Party’s vote (early on, he won here and there, then when he had a big delegate lead, the opposition just gave up); according to the long-running Gallup party-identification tracker, during the 2016 primary season, the R average was a tad under 28% of respondents. Being generous, one could reasonably say that the moron gained the nomination, the realistic means to get to the WH, on the strength of 12~15% of Americans.
So there is a major factor to consider. Mainstream candidates can end up being nominated by the Party’s extreme element, and other candidates who might actually be a more sensible choice (hell Gary the Stoner probably would have made a better president than Disastrophe Junk Tragedy) are squeezed out by the dominance of these two parties.
So, that should be the first matter to be addressed. Though, how we could get there in a country that is already under the thumb of the two parties, which surely would resist ceding their position in any way, looks like a daunting challenge.
More importantly, though, CFSG has exposed for all to see (at least, those paying attention) the flaws in the premise of imperial presidency. It might make sense for a large business to have a singular helmsman, but the nation is rather a more complex entity than even MegaCorp.
____ I submit that the executive branch needs more modularity, that have one person in control of all of it is just plain stupid. And, quite frankly, I believe that the voters would prefer to not be stuck with a monolithic choice, where, in some cases, each candidate has positives and negatives. How to make such a system practical for the voters, though, might be somewhat problematic.
It really doesn’t. A CEO, especially one of a large corporation, might set overall policy and goals but will rely on a rather large team of executives to execute those goals and policy.
Trump, on the other hand, never had a ‘large’ business, except maybe in a revenue sense. He’s always dealt with a small handful of people, some of whom handled the more mundane tasks that the CEO of a large company, who don’t usually inherit their positions, might have trained for throughout their careers.
No wonder Trump sticks with what he knows and tosses a lot of people out and relies on Jared Kushner otherwise. He’s never had to have an effective executive team and has always done more 1-1 setups.