The pork barrel tussle in USA today is this:

great piece from a friend Goh Chung Meng to my earlier rantings-

The pork barrel tussle in USA today is this:

No enough money to go around, so help me but do not help him. Help only the Wall Street guys. Helping the rest of America is simply wrong. It is easier to say the word “wrong” by branding. Every night they have paid talkers on the TVs telling people why helping to get healthcare to every Americans is wrong. Helping autos and airlines and housing is wrong because it is for the common people and that is communism according to them, the Wall Street idiots. Helping the capitalists is capitalism – why have we not learnt this in schools?

Helping capitalist is right – it is capitalism. A country of capitalists created by capitalists for capitalists. The defence of capitalism is as natural as breathing.

Helping the common people is wrong – what the hell is that? Kindness as an ideology? Well, it is not capitalism and so it must be wrong. Only one state sponsored theory can dominate in America.

The sad truth is that there is not enough money to help all in America. If you are not pro-capitalists you have no money to run expensive campaigns. Can’t run, can’t win. But if you do not promised to help the average Joe, you are not getting the votes.

The people who are the problem are attacking the solutions because it is cannibalising on their own blood supply. You have a picture of a rich patient in an intensive care unit harping the virtue of blood donations only in front of their ICU rooms. They cannot attack blood donation itself because they need it but they can attack blood donation drives elsewhere by “branding”. They have the cheek to do it. Their survival is correct evolution. Others’ survival is an evolutionary mistake. Instead of the fittest survive, we have the most well fed survive.

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You summed up the root of American financial trouble today which is that greed is being rewarded on the upside while the pain of risks is not inflicted directly on those who created those risks. The “moral hazards” thing. All kinds of risks are embedded in transactions and not accounted for. The art of detaching the risks from the benefits is the purpose of financial engineering. The more complicated and globalised the products, the better. No ownership of risks is ever intended. For Alan Greenspan to say that financial bubbles cannot be known or determined until it happens is precisely to deny any ownership of risks until risks appeared and by that time it is most likely a tax payers’ risks because it would be too big for anyone else to shoulder. It is the US system and policies which allowed risks to build up undetected. American still preached “risks management” as a formal subject to the rest of the world but is blind to the risks in their own system.