ConservaDems = Oxy"morons"

Financial Product Innovation?

Whenever I see an article about the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a phrase similar to the following always seems to appear somewhere in the article:

"Conservatives fear that the if the new agency's regulations are too stringent, they may stifle financial product innovation."

But is that necessarily a bad thing? Back in the "Good Old Days" (i. e., pre-Reagan), when a man with a high school education and a blue-collar job could own a home, and send his kids to college without his wife having to take a job, the whole financial field of endeavour could be pretty well characterized by a single word - BORING! Nobody talked about, expected, or even really wanted innovation in the field of finance, bacause none was necessary. Back then, Americans made real, physical, consumer products, like clothing, appliances, furniture and cars. The best and brightest Americans were responsible for innovations in the fields of technology, manufacturing ands medecine, among others.

Nowadays, we've shipped most of our real industry offshore, predominantly to Asian countries. Kids who graduate College with Masters and Doctorates in fields like Physics have started taking jobs in finance, instead of industry, because that's where the most money is to be made. These bright young men began applying their brilliance to this previously boring sector, creating the "new and innovative" products like Derivatives and Credit Default Swaps, which in no small degree helped to crash the global economy.

So let's get some tough regulators appointed under the new Financial reform laws, rein in this kind of "innovation", and make banking boring again!

I didn't see the recent Robin Hood flick with Russell Crowe, but from what I read, it underplayed the "robbing the rich and giving to the poor" theme, choosing instead sweeping, large-scale battle scenes - a war paradigm. I can't speak for what I haven't watched, but if that's true, it's a good thing. Today, the last thing Americans want is someone robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Our social value system has been so corrupted by rampant debt under robber baron economics – a matrix dominated by the wealthy few, hidden from equity and social accountability by opaque multinational corporations and government regulations and tax laws skewed to favor the rich and powerful - that most of us don't even realize we have a national case of Stockholm Syndrome - we have fallen in love with the captors who are raping us. This is the horror of empire.

So a "hero" like Robin Hood is no hero at all. He's a wealth-redistributing communist.

His greatest critics are not the wealthiest, from whom he is stealing. Strangely, today the folks who complain the loudest are often the ones who wish they were wealthy, and want to be able to achieve it "without government interference." The "have-nots" have bought the lie that if they work hard enough in their forced-part-time shift at Walmart, they can reach the upper echelons of a classless society...

But we are not a classless society.

And the "equal opportunity" of early American land runs (genocide of native peoples, and regulated opportunity, primarily for whites, notwithstanding...) no longer exists amid firmly fixed geographic and economic boundaries of an aristocratic society-in-denial.

So the folks who believe in and pray most for the American Dream are the victims of a cruel myth. Yes, there are a few exceptions from time to time. These exceptions become the Results-Not-Typical-Token-Ad-Sweethearts who sadly perpetuate the myth, based on their own atypical success.

I would argue that no one earns $53,965,418.00. Especially when there are entire families struggling to survive on pennies, and they are working harder than many corporate-celebrity-CEOs, just to get by. In 2010, someone making $11,500 per year is living OVER the poverty line. In 2007, Lloyd C. Blankfein earned $53,965,418.00 as CEO of Goldman Sachs. That's 54 million dollars in a single year. That's hoarding resources.

This is nothing less than economic oppression.

Every town

has it's ups and downs

Sometimes ups

Outnumber the downs

But not in Nottingham...

The difference today between mythic Nottingham is that taxes were the fiend in that time. Today, it is the lack of government regulation that leaves powerless individuals at the mercy of corporations. Most large companies pay no income tax at all. They receive breaks for cutting wages, pensions, and health benefits, and for shipping jobs overseas. This is the tyranny of stock market corporatism: driving short-term gains in stock prices is more important than providing a quality product or service, or sustaining long-term viability. So call me a Marxist, but we need a Robin Hood today. Not one who righteously kills everyone who opposes him, but one who gets back to the ornery advocacy of robbing from the rich to give to the poor.