Ironic that Spitzer’s extramarital activity disqualifies him from working on fixing the capital markets, whereas those men and women who caused the failure of the banks and insurance companies are invited into the closed door meetings to brainstorm a fix the problems they created.

We should send Spitzer a Dear Judy letter. Come back to work and to life.
Some roots need untangling.

regulations vs “the free market myth” is one of my favorite discussions, I did a piece on it over on my diary

Contrary to corporate spin, regulations do not arise out of nowhere, they do not emanate from political whole cloth, regulations in just about every example were written to address issues industry caused themselves.

Nor do regulations cost consumers money, most of the time regulations are cost saving.

Nor do regulations usually raise the price of goods, the price of goods are usually based on what consumers are willing to pay, not the cost to produce that product, for instance, football tickets are much higher then baseball tickets even though a baseball team costs exponentially much more to operate.

In fact regulations lower the overall cost of consumer goods since those regulations prevent injury to ourselves and our family.

When I say “regulations are usually written because an industry created issues they refuse to address”, here’s what I mean;

Corporations do their best to defer their costs, or in other words, if they can they will have the rest of us to pay their bill.

That obviously increases their profit margin and there is nothing wrong with an industry that tries to increase their profit margin, in fact that’s what they should be doing, however we need to make certain they don’t accomplish that goal at our expense.

Here’s an example;

I remember back in the 70’s, flying over New York or L.A, you would look out of your airplane window and see a literal bubble of “yellow” encasing the city.

They called it “smog” and it came from industry, you could also see where some of it came from, you saw it billowing from smokestacks and belching from automobiles

Obviously this smog caused bronchitis and other health issues real time, however the future health toll was not even known at the time and we can assume those chemicals have been the cause of cancer and other problems later on down the road.

The industries that caused this smog refused to clean up the mess they themselves produced, they refused to pay the health care for those individuals they affected, they wanted you, me, and our kids to pay for their mess

We would pay with our health and the health of those we love.

Thank goodness we realized the issues being created by industry and we realized a set of regulations had to be created

We needed to force industry to clean up their own crap

Low and behold, the EPA was created. (under that ultra-liberal president named Richard M Nixon)

and it goes on but the bottom line, industry brings regulation on themselves because they refuse to pay their own bills

Thanks for the insights EW

What Spitzer does in his private life is between him and his wife. Real questions as to why this guy was targeted.

ot listening to Amy Goodmans interview with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn on Friday.
Worth it. Amy’s interviews and focus are always worth it.

http://www.democracynow.org/

Newt Gingrich blabbing this morning on NPR that the
solution to our woes is repealing Sarbanes-Oxley,
a 0% captial gains rate and a 12% corporate income tax rate.

Keep up the good work, Newt.
That will be a killer platform for 2012.

isn’t this always what happens when someone is getting close to revealing the nature of something that others wish kept hidden? they find something to take him out of action.. clearly the knives were out for spitzer..

sounds like summers is a shoe in re post 20..

We have to get beyond the Puritanism that takes a big thinker effective public servant like Spitzer out of the picture [Tho it seems to me he was flying outside his comfort zone – are the two related?]. James Galbraith spoke on Bill Moyers a few weeks back about the need to get on all the corporate fraud Bush enabled Cheney et al to ignore, which to my mind means foster.]

Probably OT – but what the hell happened with the big deal investigation in Spitzer Hooker Up Gate? All the dirt in the seams got magically released first, and it turns out now he’s not even facing a jaywalking ticket? Methinks something stinks about this scenario a lot worse than the E-man’s kinks.

Heres the link:

http://www.gregpalast.com/elli…..ts-nailed/

One of the co-conspirators is featured here, promoting the agenda of the country to whom he is most loyal:

http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/…..e4qGSU8z2G

Sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling came up with a term to describe what happened to Spitzer – “centipedes.” He wrote about it on his blog at Wired Defining the Centipede. Kind of a clunky term, but here’s his take:

“Centipedes” are covert conspiracies meant to drive politicians from power by creating moral panics. Centipedes have the same dynamics as modern terror-groups, but they exploit sexual scandal instead of bloody mayhem. Centipedes are a cheap, highly effective, low-risk, highly-mediated method of political destabilization. ….

While pretending to be about spontaneous indignation and moral values, centipedes are coolly calculated and all about power.

The asymmetrical advantage that enables a “centipede” is that the conspirators themselves are never outed. They plot, they find a sexual weakness, they accumulate data about it, they launch a scandal from out of the woodwork, and while exposing private deeds to the public glare, the conspirators themselves remain unseen.

He notes that this is a global phenomenon. One of the things that a real media would do is to hunt down the source of these sorts of rumors, bring them into the light. As it is now, there is no sense of balance on these things.

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