Petr Message Board

Whoops I found my post they didn't delete it.

1. I perceive Obama doing much to fix the wrongs created by the previous administration and made worse by stupid ideologies and fiscal foolishness.

2. I advocatae democratic-capitalism and beleiev the system has to be managed for better social good, or we end up where we are now.

3. The Bush yeaers will forever be known as an aberrant period of "hands-off-the markets-look-the-other-way Republicanism" when regulations were routinely left unenfored and the American people lost democratic freedoms to a power-mad executive branch obsessed with secrecy.

4. Europe has the problems they have. We have the problems we have.

5. You are entitled to you opinion and I am entitled to mine. It's a free internet.

6. This is hysterically funny and, I think, encapsulates your views, intellectual level and personality:

"Limbaugh is a deliberate distraction concocted by Democrat strategists to get people with a first grade mentality as oblivious to what's going on for as long as possible." By this I assume you mean "to get REPUBLICANS with a first grade mentality as oblivious to what's going on for as long as possible."

7. Your "intelligence" is a fallacy and I'm tired of you exposing it to me. Please keep it in your pants, where it belongs. IGNORE.

Bush tacitly admits the remedy for the self-dealing, the accounting frauds, and the other conflicts of interest that are now placing the entire economy in jeopardy is government regulation -- something the Republicans have vilified since Ronald Reagan.

The entire system of self-regulation has collapsed. Free markets, it turns out, don't prevent brokers from peddling junk to unsuspecting investors while they enrich themselves or auditors from conspiring with executives to cook company books.

Market discipline doesn't stop insiders from selling shares they are promoting to the public even as the company is rotting from within or senior company officials from looting the pensions of workers or CEOs from scheming to pump up stock so they can cash in options. Only regulation can change these perverse incentives.

Moreover, the career of George Bush himself epitomizes the kind of self-dealing and insider enrichment that men like Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers raised to new heights. Bush can tactically shift his current policies, but he can't erase his own record. Just as one corporation after another now faces close scrutiny of past dealings, so does Bush.

In the Harken affair, Bush served on the board of a company that falsely inflated its earnings -- a smaller-scale version of Enron or WorldCom. Only eight days before the Harken Energy Corp. was forced to disclose large losses, Bush, who was given the stock on very favorable terms for serving on the board and for "consulting," sold his stock for $848,560. Once the losses were made public, the stock plunged. It's highly improbable that Bush, an insider, was ignorant of the company's real finances when he dumped the stock.

Bush failed to file timely documents disclosing this insider trade.

When the SEC (in the regime of the elder George Bush) investigated and excused Bush of wrongdoing, the SEC's general counsel was one James Doty, who had been George W. Bush's lawyer when young Bush, fronting for a group of businessmen, bought the Texas Rangers baseball club. Imagine the Republican indignation if the Whitewater investigation had uncovered anything like this kind of misconduct on the part of Bill Clinton.

So Bush is credible neither personally nor in terms of the remedies he proposes. His proposal of prison time for corrupt executives is a phony.

The SEC already has the power to prosecute criminal fraud. All it takes is someone tougher than former lobbyist Harvey Pitt in charge. The real need is a total restructuring of corporate governance and tight regulatory prevention of conflicts of interest at all levels. It's the barrel that's rotten.

WASHINGTON: Six months into his presidency, George W. Bush is "quietly and steadily using the federal government's far-reaching regulatory authority to stamp his imprint on the American society, easing enforcement of many government rules," says the Wall Street Journal . He is "aided by a cadre of appointees who are skeptical of government regulation, if not hostile to it," WSJ notes. Bush, the Journal says, was easing enforcement of many government rules. The effects of the changes are beginning to reverberate throughout the nation's economy, among banks and hospitals, oil companies and telecommunications giants, employers with labour problems and companies seeking tax breaks. At the department of health and human resources, the environmental protection agency has frozen a probe of more than 100 energy companies suspected of violating the clean air act, after vice president Cheney questioned whether the law had been properly applied. The department of labour, says the paper, is shifting emphasis from prosecution of workplace violations to helping employers avoid violations in the first place. And just on August 2, treasury department officials moved to ease tax shelter regulations. In each case, the Journal notes, the approach of administration officials to regulatory policy represents a philosophical shift as sharp "as any occurring in the legislative arena." The effort, says the paper, seamlessly blends the philosophic bent and political self-interest of the nation's first president to hold an MBA (degree from Harvard). "Cheering on Bush's approach," says the business paper, "are the corporate executives who financed his presidential bid, helping raise a record-smashing $104 million for his primary campaign and $166 million in unregulated soft money donations to the Republican national committee." Most of his top financial backers come from businesses with huge stakes in regulatory shifts, including banking companies, utilities and health-care providers. For Republican donors and administration officials alike, says the Journal, regulatory rollback represents a major piece of unfinished business. President Reagan set out to tame regulations in the 1980s. And even George Bush, took a more moderate approach to regulatory issues, named his vice president, Dan Quayle, to head a White House "competitiveness council" designed to curtail the reach of rules. "What is different this time," says the paper, "is that the Republican administration - from top cabinet officials to second-tier appointees - is more uniformly conservative." The upshot: just as district attorneys decide which crimes to emphasise and how aggressively to enforce them, individual agencies are setting their own priorities. And they are heeding candidate Bush's pledge to give Americans more choices and fewer orders.

re: There was no signficant deregulation passed during the Bush years of any kind I believe.


Huge Bush Deregulation Push Before Jan. 20
Posted Oct 31, 08 8:26 AM CDT in Politics


George W. Bush is president for 11 more weeks, and the White House is plotting to use that time to modify federal regulations to weaken protections for consumers and the environment. The deregulatory initiatives would be some of the most controversial of the Bush era, reports the Washington Post, lifting constraints on such things as drinking water, gas pipelines, power plant emissions, and commercial fishing.

Lobbyists representing everything from the scallop industry to kidney dialysis companies have been swarming the White House to plead for quick action, fearing a less industry-friendly administration after Jan. 20. Up to 90 new regulations are being planned, although it's unclear if the administration will finish them all in time; the Post notes that many of the Clinton administration's last-minute rules changes missed the deadline, and were overturned by incoming Bushies the day after the inauguration.