bostonbubble.com

[balor123]

I wish I could foresee anything significant happening. Business as usual won't cut it. I don't think voting Republicans in will do it. We need some kind of impending disaster: sovereign debt crisis, major war, another financial panic, etc. It's a shame that real change only happens retroactively.

[john p]

When I say "values" a lot of what I'm thinking is stuff that Ben Franklin used to say like "A stitch in time saves nine" and all those other things that people say to help them pass on wisdom. I mean these things come in from all kinds of cultures and America as the melting pot has been a value and sometimes people forget this and the whole red white and blue jingoistic stuff totally flies in the face of our "values". This is when people need to talk about them.

I think the Tea Party is trying to evoke old fundamental values like working hard and playing by the rules because they see this moral hazard that might make things prison rules.

I'm reading "Island at the Center of the Earth" which is a history of Manhattan and it is really cool to hear about how the culture of Amsterdam impacted New York. They were a very industrious and open people. Anyway, I think that promoting industrious hard working creative, open minded values will produce a peaceful and prosperous society that others will want to trade with and engage culturally. Cultures that become predators end up starting wars. Now that we've painted ourselves into a corner economically, I just hope we can prosper shortly. When people get pissed they can lose their judgment and if you have a bad leader who can easily manipulate a society they can uproot them if they aren't tied to their values. Obama showed us that people can be uprooted pretty easily by someone without much of a record with a bunch of flowery words. Thankfully, he's not a mean hearted guy.

This housing situation is really a big deal for our Economy. Jeez, this little hobby of real estate as a spectator sport has turned into ground zero of our economy. I should have decided to focus on restoring old cars or something....

[Xenos]

[quote="john p"] When people get pissed they can lose their judgment and if you have a bad leader who can easily manipulate a society they can uproot them if they aren't tied to their values. Obama showed us that people can be uprooted pretty easily by someone without much of a record with a bunch of flowery words. Thankfully, he's not a mean hearted guy.

This housing situation is really a big deal for our Economy. Jeez, this little hobby of real estate as a spectator sport has turned into ground zero of our economy. I should have decided to focus on restoring old cars or something....[/quote]

Not to go off on a political tangent, but did Obama "uproot" people's values? His appeal was more along the lines of reviving politics and civic engagement, not being cynical or unprincipled about it. Now whether he has governed along those principles is another issue, with plenty of criticism from the left as well as the right.

As for real estate, it has become a way in which we, through marketed products, actualize our personalities and established social identities and engage with our communities. The enormous misallocation of resources in the last few decades, now that we are coming to terms with it, is causing a tremendous souring of civic life. We may lack for adequate leadership for a few decades, because politics have gotten so debased that competent leaders can not easily be elected, and if elected, will not be allowed to govern.

[john p]

Yeah, you're right, Obama did bring people to the table and got people psyched about voting which is great.

The "value" I was talking about (which can be easily debated) is that what he represented was someone without much of a track record and he got people to devalue experience for "judgment". Bush did the same thing, he sold himself as the "Education President" when Texas's public schools weren't anywhere the top tier. Illinois is a corrupt pay to play culture as evidenced by Rod B. and Tony Rezko etc. Illinois also has major financial problems so it wasn't like Obama had any proven results to navigate through what we were facing.

The value I"m talking about is the same value that you'd use if you were going to have someone come in and build an addition to your house. Wouldn't you check references and look at their past work? Would you choose a contractor because they spoke in an inspirational manner and gave you a "thrill up your leg"? The answer is "No", in fact you'd be hard pressed to get an assistant coaching job at a Division 3 College if you didn't have experience. The problem is that people don't hold politicians to the same standards as everyone else with respect to telling the truth or having experience or subject matter knowledge etc. Politicians have done such a great job self advocating that they have lowered the standards where a Community Organizer can become President. I mean Obama spent most of his tenure as a Senator campaigning and much of the stuff he was passionate about he was wrong i.e. he was a jerk to General Petraus and fought the Surge in Iraq adn said it wouldn't work, but watch now he'll take the bows for policy he once tried to undermine.

I'm not saying that people without experience can't succeed. Take John F. Kennedy. Lyndon Johnson once said after Kennedy died and he had all these inexperienced eggheads from Harvard in his Administration, "Hell, I'd rather have one guy who served as a Town Sherrif".

It makes me nervous when people tell others that experience isn't a factor because it lowers the expectation and the performance threshold and opens up the competition to those that shouldn't qualify. People need to have standard and filters and not be suceptable to flowery nonsense. Having the ability to create a reality that elevates the standard of living is a lot harder than just simply talking about it.

[Xenos]

You shift from values to standards there -- maybe I am biased, but after a tremendous amount of cynicism and self-dealing in the government in the Clinton and Bush administrations, the goo-goo values of Obama's campaign were pretty important ones.

As for standards, where can you find experience in acting as a president? One can argue that governors are better suited for executive positions, but that seems to limit the choices pretty severely. And we can't poach a proven executive from another country, can we? Obama started at the bottom of the social activism/political business, and worked his way up. This is not much different than a business executive getting his start in the mailroom. Would you argue Jack Welch should be defined by his first job working at GE?

We get the president we want, in most cases. I sure wish we were smarter about what we want.

[mpr]

[Renting in Mass]

I think Community Organizer is right-wing code for Socialist.

Plus, you only have to change two letters to go from "Community Organizer" to "Communist Organizer." Coincidence?

[Boston ITer]

Folks, as time marches forward, outside of certain Vermont farming/food production initiatives, more and more of the nation is engaging in non-tradeable goods & services. Whole barges are returning to Asia, through the Panama Canal, completely empty. Yes, in place of design->production->worldwide sales, we are turning into a society which washes each others' undergarments. At this point in time, our best and brightest will become lawyers, doctors, or financiers and not engineers vis-a-vis designers.

The sector, which is bringing home the bacon is in fact trading. All of the world's exchanges have opportunities to make money, as a *rent* on the overall machine, however, as it is bringing money into the country, much of it is felt from the Hamptons, Long Island to much of the other wealthy towns in and around the tri-state area. This is a type of economic bifurcation.

Now, with the above as a backdrop, don't you think that this whole theater of politics is a joke? I mean calling a community organizer a communist and then his later anointed opponent, a Nazi or a Klansman, doesn't change the facts that as a nation, we're not producing on the global scale anymore and have become a financial society much like Switzerland but with a 45x the population.

[john p]

Look, being a community organizer is a decent and honorable thing and trying to build a society from the bottom up gives you an important perspective.

I don't want to inflame you guys, I'm just saying that the market is suceptable to irrationality when individuals don't hold "standards" (ok?). Beyond that, even if someone passes through the filter of these standards, it is still a citizens or consumers duty to be aware.

I think the negative reaction that most get when people call Obama a Community Organzier is because they are still in puppy love with him and are intoxicated with the belief in hero worship. Hero worship and a government of the people don't align because a government of the people requires individuals to be critical and take on load bearing capacity while a hero worship or leader poisoned with vanity would want to circumvent all the checks and balances put in place to actually restrain his ambitions. Our government is designed to get buy in from the people and this President is used to having people follow him like the pied piper and is frustrated that he actually has to go out and explain how massive deficit spending and taxing future generations is beneficial.

I think also that people devalue results. Obama created a cult of personality which was framed on certain personal achievements i.e. being the head of Law Review of Harvard, being a lawyer, law professor and being active in the community. These are credentials not results that can be measurable in terms of improving peoples lives (to the scale that would graduate the level of being President). He focused on himself and used one credential to get the next one and used his experiences like stepping stones for self promotion. It actually takes time to stick it out and get results; Obama never stuck around long enough to be able to follow through and create results. Are the neighborhoods in Chicago that much better off than before he got there? Did Barack Obama help clean up the corruption in Chicago or did he artfully negotiate through it and remain silent? He talks about cleaning up government but what act of courage did he ever exemplify while in Chicago? Obama knew that if he bucked the system and was honorable and did shine a light on corruption in Chicago, HE'D NEVER HAVE BEEN SENATOR. He kept his mouth shut to the corruption because it got in the way of self promotion; he needed those corrupt individuals to help him get along. Why was he dealing with the likes of Tony Rezko? I have seen video of Obama endorsing "Hot Rod" Blagoiavich. Do you think that Obama didn't know about Rezko's corruption, Blago's corruption, or the rantings of his preacher? That absolute nut of a preacher wrote a sermon called "The Audacity of Hope". Obama used that sermon title for his book and the preacher gave his team a blessing the morning he announced his candidacy, but people weren't critical enough to ask themselves if it was reasonable that he had no idea about this preachers beliefs.

I don't care if people get mad at me because they still believe in hero worship and I'm popping their bubble. If FOX News tells a story about Obama getting help to buy his house from someone who gets convicted of 16 counts of political corruption and I find out that it isn't true, then I'm going to stop listening to FOX News. If FOX News is correct and that actually did happen and I don't hear it on MSNBC, then I'm just going to stop listening to MSNBC because they are filtering out the truth.

Here is "Hard Ball's" Chris Matthews of MSNBC who talks about getting a "thrill up his leg" when Obama speaks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no9fpKVXxCc

Here is the same guy claiming that he is effectively a political operative for Obama's Administration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0ClcIZjmlo&NR=1

Who's falling for the political talking points? This is a guy in the Press who's role is to be critical in little boy puppy love with a young untested self promoter poisoned with vanity. Then, he says that it is his job to be a political operative for the Administration. Do you wonder why now why FOX's ratings are destroying MSNBC's?

He MPR: "Scoreboard", your boy isn't doing very well. I told people to be careful with him and I was right.

I even know why he's failing. Geithner and Summers and Benanke are trying to reconfigure the plumbing to get things to flow better but it's not working. It's not working because people don't understand what their doing. It's kind of like if you took a two lane log jam in a highway and opened it up to four lanes, people would understand it and spread out and the flow would open up right away. People know how to drive on a highway. These guys are trying to open things up but people don't see the openings. For example, the number of loan remodifications was tiny relative to the amount that needed them. It didn't work because people couldn't access them. The guy who has been a town sherrif understands the capacity of individuals because he gets the phone calls from those that he serves and understands that these individuals need to gear into the overall machinery. With Obama there is a total disconnect because with hero worship people get passive and expect him to do everything. He is frustrated with the fact that he has to explain himself. If he was a sherriff he'd know that you needed to politic and teach and explain to make things flow right. In Iraq, the Military's job was to create those "lanes of opportunity", the politicians job is to encourage the Iraqi's to drive on them. His lack of passion for what the Military achieved was pretty curious to me, it seems that the achievement has to be about him for him to be excited. Beyond that, he still has a job to do as a statesman to encourage Iran to stop working with Russia to develop nuclear weapons. Wasn't his charm going to make everyone stop doing bad things?

I'm going to be critical of Obama because he got graft from Tony Rezko, a man who stole money set aside for the poor, a political fixer who was convicted of 16 counts of political corruption. Rezko didn't turn the heat on in his slums one winter. Obama took hundreds of thousands of dollars from Rezko's fund raisers and then gave speeches about how we had to clean up government. When Obama talks about cleaning up politics I know he is a complete phony.

People need to be skeptical of someone who moves up the ranks too quickly. You have to believe in fairy tales and heros to accept such lack of results. Obama has credentials, he hasn't built up positive results for anyone but himself.

[Boston ITer]

[john p]

I don't think people are debating you because they agree with you.

Just like the Stock Market when Price to Earnings were ridiculous, we had a Candiate who's values versus proven results were ridiculous. When people start to value fundamentals like earnings or proven results we are less suceptable to bubbles.

Listening to people yell at me for daring to pop their bubble shows you how bubbles can last and can be created. Obama is a bubble and the same irrationality that filled the stock market bubble filled the housing bubble filled his candidacy.

If it is too good to be true, it most likely isn't. Obama's response "You're a cynic and you're not hopeful." He made it Hope versus Cynic and in doing so uprooted people from their duty to be critical.

[Kaidran]

I think your continued references to FOX/GOP talking points severely hurts your argument John. You have made a lot of thoughtful and illuminating posts on this forum but when it comes to politics you are so black and white that your posts become very difficult to read.

[Boston ITer]

[Kaidran]

Ultimately I think your points are the most valid Boston ITer. The loss of jobs that actually make stuff is more important. Its just a shame that we cannot see it because we are stuck enthralled by the circus.

[john p]

I'll lay off this for a while.

Just ask yourself this though, if the Republicans win Congress, how will this affect the Housing Market? How will it affect the Economy?

Keynesian Economics frightens many people today. When FDR did it, the context was a little different (globally) and people understood it so it worked better.

Reagan was a great communicator and many people still have in their recent memory the notion that "Government isn't the solution, it is the problem".

As long as you guys are open to these possiblities and make preparations for such, I've done what I hope and by no means do I feel any ill will towards anyone who disagrees.

I asked MPR what the "message" should be to what he considers to be a misled angry Tea Party guy and he said that he basically didn't know where to begin because he didn't believe that they were on the level. I'm just saying these Tea Party guys had the momentum to help win in Massachusetts in New Jersey and Virginia so if you disagree with them, now is a good time to think about what that message ought to be. Ronald Reagan had pretty tough numbers going into his second term and he won by a landslide because although he hadn't met with much success, he got people to believe in his strategy. He got people to follow. People still remember those successes via cutting government and taxes and they remember Clinton's successes and they can't make the connection between what they have seen succeed and what Obama wants to do. Even if Obama does everything technically correct, if people don't believe and don't follow, it won't work out well for us.

Lastly, when people act like intellectual snobs and rag on FOX News without any factual data, it just draws more people to FOX News.