Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/24/2011 11:01 PM Report

Barney Frank said, "it takes you two elections if not three to really get power in America." Didn't the Democrats sweep in 2008 and have all the power? Didn't the Democrats consider this political capital and a mandate from the people? The Republicans don't have a complete mandate from 2010 but they play the same political "they are on my side" game.

JohnGelles  03/23/2011 11:48 PM Report

REMant said,

"Redistribution is exactly what I mean by coming at the problem [of a jobless recovery and wages that are below a living wage] from the wrong end.

"I said a long time before the crash that the unions would be far better off to back a stable currency than higher wages and benefits, simply because it values labor over assets, and they can never win any other way.

"The idea that we can inflate our way out of this is equally misguided. The entire Fed strategy has been to shift the burden of this crisis from those who created it, to the public as a whole in the form of inflation."

===== end what REMant said =====

Gelles agrees the problem is HOW TO FIND JOBS and HOW TO PAY FAIR LIVING WAGES.

Gelles also would not take money away from the rich to solve the problem.

Gelles would hope the rich INVESTED in business that creates JOBS.

If sch JOBS are not created, I say government must make the required investment. This should be done with debt-free sovereign money. Inflation must then be prevented by savings and, if necessary, the inflation fighters that worked in WW II (wage and price controls and rationing).

Gelles also agrees with REMant that the burden of the depression has been born by people who never created it. That is the banks and insurance people who created the unpayable debt that caused the depression have been rescued by taxpayers and the FED -- while workers have been allowed to lose what little wealth they had.

HOWEVER, I do not agree with REMant that FED rescue actions caused the depression or made it worse. They just did not do enough: they should have created more jobs and higher wages by creating more liquidity than they did.

JohnGelles  03/23/2011 07:54 AM Report

Barney Frank and REMant raise fundamental issues of security and democracy in the world evolving before our eyes -- as Asia rises and the USA declines in manufacturing the world's capital and consumer products for use and sale.

We cannot have great wealth and confidence that we will not lose it in a new world war or global economic depression if we do not resolve the contradictions in real global systems and lack of systems that condemned the 20th Century to become the bloodiest in history, as well as the most informed.

We are connected by human language, geography, and monetary trading systems (and contradictions) that defy description, purpose and understanding.

Barney Frank talks so fast he never thinks beneath the nonsensical details of American elective power and de facto mafia capitalism. He has no strategic vision or purpose taking up space in the brain in his head that we once relied on to contribute "law" to our accidental empire. He belongs in a lesser role, or in no role at all. By chance he gets elected to a congress of totally incompetent lawmakers. And he and them run off at the mouth as Republicans and Democrats waste all our time with dysfunctional structures, systems and denials of our inherited rights to be the scientists, engineers and morally principled leaders of a world waiting to be born.

We are constrained by

a. The fundamental flaw in laissez faire: it relies on human silence instead of human thought. It looks for answers to questions of what to do in the malls and markets for sneakers and bombs instead of restatements of purpose, objectives and enduring imperatives that we refrain from another world war and from neglecting the basics of work, water, food, health, respect for Malthus, Lincoln, science, compromise and "cooperation ahead of competition in the design of new world orders evolving over time".

b. The dream of debt as fundamental and profit as possible in a world where reality knows neither as more than human error. Cost accounting and logistics can be paired to reach the moon. If these two must be resolved for a longer journey, let them be. Property is a convenience to be harmonized with action. Harmony is the goal and action asks for purpose.

c. The curse of legal precedent in a universe ruled by facts. Respect for law must be revised to focus on its results not on its language, on its justice not its form, on equity not assaninity, and on people possessing wisdom and authority not libraries holding infinite accounts of human error enshrined as answers. Science provides the best model for belief. Reason provides the best model for decision. Salomonic and jury systems, tailored to meet real need, provide the path to practical reason that analogy can only distort. If there is a monetary incentive to mandarinism writ dark and deep, you may expect the rule of law to lose all meaning over time. If ordinary juries can determine facts, juries of justices who never practiced law can better determine what it ought to be rather than pretend it was ever fixed before events occurred.

,

Frank asks why we have forces around the world and especially in Europe. We have them for their announced purpose -- to prevent wars we can't afford from ever happening again. We are the accidental leader of the free world. One day WE will include all of us on earth. But that day is not tomorrow. It is tomorrow and a day. We will know when that day comes by the absence of black helicopters and the presence of white shirts and family ties where they mean peace and love in overwhelming presence.

CarolJ  03/22/2011 01:56 PM Report

Barney Frank is an old, old man. The Federal Government should be adminstering our Social Security that WE PAY into and not doing what they want to do with it. Congress people do not pay into Social Security, they have their own fantastic pension, so hell with us people that they are suppose to be representing. I see it as taxation etc with very poor representation. Now off my bandwagon.

Good show as always.

anne4444  03/22/2011 01:10 PM Report

Wondering… if he would spend more time to promote income.

TAX income is not a true income,. It is an EXPENSE INCOME because you have to have true income or expense in order to pay the tax.

The expense issues are important, but income issues are more important. Without income, you will have no equity; mostly… you will have no expense sooner or later.

REMant  03/22/2011 10:55 AM Report

I find nothing wrong with Ms Warren, but the real problem with this legislation is that it comes at the issue from the wrong end, assuming you can regulate (in the absence of a 100% reserve requirement) what is essentially a pyramid scheme. We haven't been able to so this with Social Security and Medicare. I hope the Tea Party realizes the issue is not simply big govt, like the Reaganites and monetarists, because as was said, they have been two-faced about it for quite a long time. If, however, the Tea Party can get rid of the wholesale inflation being created by the Federal Reserve system, a lot of this controversy will evaporate, along with our debt, whose real size will become apparent, but eventually disappear, and I can think of no other way it will. But if the Tea Party wants to shut off funding it is certainly within its right, and it is not thereby trying to become the executive, a comment, which, I thought, revealed a lot about the Democratic mindset. It was Keynes, BTW, who wrote that stock markets were worthless, and I doubt he was the first. Disintermediation means the shift of investment from banks to securities.

I think this little tirade about Libya completely out of place, but what he says about the defense budget is clearly true. We set up commands like Central Command and Africa Command to join European Command and Pacific Command precisely to get involved in these places, in roles such counterinsurgency and nation-building. It is no doubt part of the "modernization" of the armed forces that's been going on since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and BTW, why we find generals with little or no combat experience, like Gen Ham, in charge of them. (Unlike some of them, Ham has no experience or training in international affairs, either.) But spending is not the issue, productivity is, and productivity is hurt by spending, not helped by it. Plus the widening gap in the distribution of wealth is due almost entirely to deficits both budgetary and monetary. Krugman is right about the statistics, but certainly wrong about the remedy. Redistribution is exactly what I mean by coming at the problem from the wrong end. I said a long time before the crash that the unions would be far better off to back a stable currency than higher wages and benefits, simply because it values labor over assets, and they can never win any other way. The idea that we can inflate our way out of this is equally misguided. The entire Fed strategy has been to shift the burden of this crisis from those who created it, to the public as a whole in the form of inflation. If Frank thinks either is right, I am not at all upset to see him in a minority position.