By Manila Ryce
Published Saturday, November 15th, 2008, 12:16 am
Filed under: Videos: Political, Economic, Videos, US Politics

3 Responses to “Kucinich Grills Kashkari”

1. Rep. Cummings of Baltimore, this guy is criminally uneducated, pandering to emotions rather than scrutinizing the questioner. After the first round of questioning, it became apparent that the whole testimony was nothing but a charade masqueraded by the officials to bluster and appear as if they are caustically fighting for the “average” citizen. They went on and on with specific examples of how their constituents are suffering and sophomorically dallying around trivial matters of financial market while entirely avoiding asking any meaningful question from Kashkari. I watched Kashkari’s eyes popping out in disbelief that how these buffoons are not even bothering asking him any pertinent question what so ever only to condescend him with snide array of misplaced rage.

   This obsession by our leaders to keep homeowners in their home will mark the end of whatever is left in this country resembling prudence and morality. I support saving all homeowners not just the irresponsible 3 million living in Mcmansions.

   Congress and Sheila Bair’s obsession with this spend-only bailout rewards the reckless and punishes the prudent. Consider the lesson it imparts to promote bailouts to the reckless. City by city, neighborhood by neighborhood, people who live beneath their means and manage money carefully will see more careless neighbors supported by federal decree. And what about the 30 percent of this nation who were smart enough to rent? Or how about the large percentage of us who gave plenty of warnings to these same people the government now wants to redistribute my taxes to so they can stay in a house twice the size the home I live in. The backlash to the 700 B bailout package was not only because of the bailout of wall street but also the bailout of the reckless homeowners and their relentless ATM / HELOC spending. As it is now these people can live in their home for over a year rent free while they find a home they should have been living in from the start.

   We are becoming a nation of people who feel it is not only okay but justified to cheat, lie, and swindle each other and the rest of the population. Personal responsibility is discouraged by the government and the mainstream media. Our nation is eating ourselves from within just to keep a facade of prosperity. Hope is being replaced by anger and desperation. Welcome to the new dawn.

   zz
   11/15/08 at 9:33 pm
   
2. 

   Kucinich is a fricken warrior! I love it when the simplest questions cause the most sophisticated suits to stutter and spit, with the popped out eyes and the pleas of “but I’m trying so hard!”

   PapaFigue
   11/16/08 at 8:28 pm
   

3. This is off-topic, but related, so I wanted to bring it up. Kos has a post cutting down on Nader *and* Nader’s supporters:
   http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/15/20137/978/447/661638

   The reason I wanted to mention this, and the reason I feel it is related to the above, is that nothing in this country will change until we completely overhaul the education system. People in this country don’t understand - and even worse, don’t care about - how the government is supposed to run, what the jobs of elected officials are, and generally do not possess even the base-level critical thinking skills necessary to parse through what comes out of a candidate’s mouth versus what that candidate’s record and corporate connections are and apply that information in such a way that they can vote in their own interests.

   When someone like Kos highlights a comment such as the one below (which he did at the end of his post) it shows that the Democrats are just as anit-intellectual as the Republicans - they are just able to market themselves as intellectuals better than the other side (kind of like McDonalds being able to market themselves as more healthy than Burger King). Here’s the quote (Kos introduces it as “Great comment by Ed in Montana”):
   “… Reagan went on to murder 250,000 people in his insane wars in Central America, and the Dubya has terminated between 600,000 and 1.2 million people from his war in Iraq.
   There are buckets of blood worth of differences between those candidates. And yes, Nader and his lunatic supporters need to be held accountable for these actions.”

   Now, first we have to get past the fallacy that these people like to throw out there - that only Republicans start wars and kill people overseas. If we want to take things down to the most basic level, anyone who pays taxes in this country has blood on their hands - but again, I don’t want to focus on that part. What I do want to focus on, however, is that these people love to point to Reagan/Bush and talk about how many people “they” killed. It’s easier for them that way - it’s the external enemy necessary to rile up their supporters and vote “the bastards” out of office (hope and change is coming, no doubt).

   But, it looks past the reality (another thing the Kos’s like to push is that they are part of the “reality-based” world… yeah, right) that very few, if any, of the killings that have happened throughout the history of this country happened because a president deemed it so and made it happen. If we just want to take Iraq as a for instance, there’s plenty of people to point fingers at on both sides - Colin Powell, John Kerry, the Clintons, Rumsfeld, etc.

   And, it isn’t as if there wasn’t an opposite view out there when the decisions were being made to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Those views were suppressed, though, by both sides (for the most part), and they continue to be suppressed.

   It is genius marketing that allows Kos and the others like him to get away with this type of slight of hand - without the majority of people who visit his site calling him out on it. It is marketing on the VHS versus Betamax level. Or, I guess we could say, the Democrats verses Republicans level.

   They’ve painted conservatives/Republicans as stupid, so if someone disagrees with him from that side, his followers say, “Of course they disagree - they’re stupid!”

   If someone disagrees who supports a Democratic candidate, the argument is, “Fine, disagree… but who are you going to vote for? The stupid warmonger?”

   The only people who are able to come in and not be easily dropped into one of the above categories are the few party independent/unaffiliated citizens in this country, so like all good corporations who’ve succeeded in beating their main rival, they have to now go after the smaller groups and get them in line.

   So, the argument is that by Nader saying that there was little difference between Carter/Reagan and Gore/Bush (notice that on the Kos site, they say “no difference” - which, of course, Nader never said, but let’s not get too picky here), he is responsible for the wars and killings that took place and, by extension, his supporters are also responsible.

   If this is supposed to be a “reality-based” community, then I want no part of it.

   We could make the technical argument and say that we are all responsible for those wars and killings, and I would not necessarily disagree. However, if you want to limit blame to elected representatives, then you have to go with the people and parties that actually made the decisions, don’t you?

   Isn’t that reality? Or, am I missing something here?

   At the end of the day, though, it all comes back to education. We - not Democrats, not Republicans…. all of us - have allowed the system to get out of control. We’ve allowed ourselves and our fellow citizens to be misrepresented, miseducated and, generally, just screwed over. We’ve just allowed it to happen again with this last election - and not just at the executive level.

   We do need wholesale change, and some basic hope would be nice. Instead we bought retail on credit, and we’ll now be struggling to pay it off.

   I don’t “hate” or even dislike Kos or Amato or Malkin. I don’t know them and it wouldn’t help me to focus on trying to resolve the things that I feel I have a little control over - very local issues and politics. Also, that level of emotion clouds logic and makes it harder to quickly think through problems that arise without warning - the easiest thing to pick a side and stick to it regardless of which direction the facts might point.

   I don’t see that type of illogical attachment as good for anything - not even parents or sports - but if we can’t get beyond it, it’ll be tough for human society to move beyond this current point (we’ve been stuck here for about six thousand years now).

   However, to just move a little bit forward, we can start with tearing down the public education system and starting it over from scratch. I do believe in more local control - and more money - going into the system. There is something to be said for being able to keep things local - with an eye, and acceptance, towards the larger society and world, of course.

   My apologies for the very long post. I don’t always agree with everything at the LM, but I definitely find that the people here are generally more in-line with my outlook than at any of the other sites I visit (well, except for maybe The Onion).

   Happy Mondays

   Curmei
   11/17/08 at 9:05 am
   

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