Newspeak 11/11/10

FEMINISM. A movement that claims to pursue the elevation of women to their rightful place in society. The radical segment of this movement carries their passions to ridiculous extremes.  The woman who declared Newton’s Principia Mathematica to be a “rape manual” is a good example of this. Goodness, did Newton draw an obelisk in there

somewhere that set off phallic nightmares? What does this poor soul do to keep her eyes off the Washington monument? Some women reject men altogether. Gloria Steinem said that, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Rosanne Barr said, “Women are cursed, and man is the proof.”

FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY.  Code word for spending whatever the Left thinks needs to be spent in order to achieve their goals. The overspending is usually characterized as the more palatable “investments.”

FINANCIAL REFORM. A need brought on by the financial panic of 2008. If tax cheat Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner has his way the federal government would have nearly unlimited authority to bail out struggling financial institutions. What, then, is the incentive for financial institutions to act responsibly? If we all had a government guaranteed program to bail us out when we vastly overspent our credit card accounts, would that lead to personal fiscal responsibility? Moreover, the bill proposed by the Democrats does little to change the regulation of the government entities that gave AAA ratings to mortgages that turned out to be worthless.

As it did with the stimulus bill and the healthcare bill the administration is trying to ram through a quick measure that it hopes will give them political gain. They are trying to pass legislation before they receive the report from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the crisis's causes. They have used, once again the “crisis-solution” gambit, (See Crisis, above) to insert urgency into the effort, cobble together a bill that no one understands and get it through Congress before anyone has time to evaluate it. The New York Times listed a number of prominent economists who have declared that this is a mistake.

As Nicholas F. Brady, former Treasury secretary once said, “You can’t fix what you can’t explain.” Among the critics were Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who cautioned that that the politicians need to tell the public that “we need to proceed about this in a much more deliberate and rational and thoughtful way.” Lawrence J. White, a finance professor at New York University, said it made no sense to overhaul financial regulation without addressing the future of federal housing policy. It was because of the mismanagement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the housing market ballooned and then collapsed taking a great segment of the economy with it. He described this omission from the bill as “outrageous.” Other critics have said that the measure does nothing to stabilize the markets where lenders get their money. Yet others say that the biggest problem is that the bill does nothing to regulate the regulators. Senator Chris Dodd, the author of the legislation on one hand said that the government’s failure to regulate Fannie Mae was a tragedy. Yet, he refused to insert such regulation into the bill.

The Democrats, Barack Obama in particular, have hammered the Republicans for being in bed with Wall Street. Yet, an examination of Wall Street’s financial contributions to political campaigns shows that the contributions to the Democratic Party were nearly twice as large as to the Republicans. The Democratic Party accusations are nothing more than another  red herring.