This video is from the Saturday meeting of the 42nd Legislative District Democrats. U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Everett, stopped by the meeting to chat about the healthcare reform bill that he voted for in the House:
Rep. Larsen stops by 42nd LD Democrats
November 18th, 2009 12 PM PST by - The Bellingham Herald
November 18th, 2009 at 1:05 PM
This is not the super-confident, glib, fast-talking policy wonk Larsen that I saw at the Ferndale town hall meeting last June. In this video, his feet keep moving as if they want to run away, and when he gets the feet under control, the hands start getting in the way…and the “ummm’s” and “urrr’s” make him really hard to follow. And this in front of his own Democratic committeefolk????
November 18th, 2009 at 1:36 PM
Thanks to whoever recorded and posted this video and thanks to the 42nd LD Democrats for allowing this to be recorded and posted.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:29 PM
Nice of Congressman Larsen to publicly state how he feels about those of his constituents which disagree with his stance on ‘Government Managed’, ‘Government Mandated’, ‘Public Health Care/Insurance’.
I will simply repeat ‘2′ quotes from ‘2′ different Presidents of the United States:
Do not expect to pull up the weak by pulling down the strong. - Pres. Calvin Coolidge
It is just as ‘important’ that business keep out of government as it is ‘important’ that government keep out of business. - Pres. Herbert Hoover
That pretty much sums up my opinion of how Congress is over managing the economy and bankrupting the United States with no regard to “How Are We Going To Pay for Any of This” or “Where Within Our Rights of The Constitution & Bill of Rights, Is It Written that Congress can Legislate Manadatory Health Insurance?”
November 18th, 2009 at 6:52 PM
Business keep out of Government?
You gotta be joking.
Who do you think provides the fodder for the Socialism paranoia,
the hot cash to grease the palms of their proxies in office
and the campaign money needed to run the entire process over and over?
Government keep out of Business?
Where have you been for the last eight years of greed,
corruption,
derivatives,
Ponzi schemes and Blackwater
while the entire Bush administration dozed in Lassiez-Fairey Land?
Whenever I see quotes cited in a post,
I always hope it’s from somebody who’s done more than just cut and paste.
Pull down the strong!
That’s what happens when society demands production from their riches instead of off-shore tax havens
secret Swiss bank accounts and active investments in Americans.
November 18th, 2009 at 9:22 PM
Ditto Ciz.
November 19th, 2009 at 1:09 AM
So Ciz doesn’t understand those quotes…maybe he/she was dozing during history and economics during class. Self reliance is possible by the vast majority of all humans. I don’t want the gov’t help & believe that people, when left to there own devices, solve their own problems faster & better than gov’t ever would. That is a different thought process than yours, I get that. Stop worrying about what others have & get back to equality of ALL Rights according to the Constitution & local Charters, for real justice. Is that too simplistic for you?
November 19th, 2009 at 9:29 AM
The point is that to copy and paste quotes from dignitaries of the past has no bearing whatsoever on the world we find ourselves in today.
These relationships are set in stone between Government and Business and no amount of out-of-context speechifying will alter anything.
So to regulate the rules that business must follow is the only job left to government that means anything to the safety of our twisted economy.
And to advocate for fewer rules means that blindness and ignorance have overwhelmed the process.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:09 AM
Well Miss O, you did only quote Coolidge and Hoover. Not exactly paramounts of virtue or American ideals as Presidents. I don’t think I remember anyone quoting them in history or economics and I am old enough I would remember.
Yet, aside from that, the America built on self reliance without government help is a figment of imagination. Unless you mean how we self reliantly tried genocide as a tool to steal the land we call the home of the brave by killing all the braves and their children. Or maybe you were thinking of Mountain Meadows where our Mormom brothers killed innocent emigrants to protect their Eden? (Sorry, I just watched September Dawn and couldn’t resist.) Maybe you are talking about, more contemporaneously where we self- reliantly turned Central America into our own slave pool for cheap labor? Or how we trashed indigenous middle east cultures by supporting the tyrants using the extremes of Islamic law to subjugate their populus as long as they sold us their oil.
Or how lunatics with Dobbsian eyes now blame all our woes on Mexicans. Or maybe you were even going back further than Coolidge (although not much) where we self reliantly sent slavers to steal human beings to be our personal pawns for growth and, again, cheap labor to do our bidding. Do you see a theme here? I don’t know that stealing from the poor to make us rich is really self reliance–as we continue to do all over Central and S. America, hell the entire world.
See the equality of ALL that you fantasize about is still not a reality. Ask any gay person. Simplistic views of history and patriotism are what have made us, collectively, the shins we are today.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:10 AM
You just spent over Eleventy Trillion tax dollars fixing a free-market banking system.
A system so wealthy it pays Billions in bonuses to the geniuses that talked taxpayers into saving their butts.
The same system that won’t lend to citizens,
cuts back on business credit and
borrows money for free from our Fed.
But please don’t Pull Down The Strong with rules!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:14 AM
The dozen or so Banks Too Big to Fail of 2008,
are now the six Banks Too Big to Fail of 2009.
That’s Socialism in Action.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:24 AM
Go Ciz. I would be curious to know if some don’t suffer great pain when their noses start to grow to super Durante proportions and what meds they use for same.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:34 AM
I’d have let them all go into bankuptcy. We had no ‘BUSINESS’ bailing them out! They should not have been encouaged by gov’t to merge & become so large that they were a threat to the economy. That’s an example where gov’t & business should not have colluded together. They created it and they destroyed it, but w/the relationship between business & gov’t beyond free mkt & Const. Principles they screwed us.
As for the evils of U.S. Domestic & Foreign policies of the past, then start vilifying all of the other Countries who were far more dispicable in their treatment of others & their own citizen’s. Only the US is evil? That’s where you lose your argument.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:39 AM
I don’t think of it as lying.
I just figure that they hope someday to be rich off the Taxpayer’s Rescue,
get a Million Dollar Bonus,
or even have their own Ponzi Scheme!
November 19th, 2009 at 10:43 AM
Miss Odie,
We certainly agree.
But letting banks fail at this point would have wiped out entire nations - Iceland comes to mind - and the investments of ordinary citizens.
The world is as it is - criminally interconnected.
Wishing it was different means taking the firm regulatory steps to rein it in.
Nobody on this board has ever said that America is evil.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:45 AM
It isn’t just the past we’re talking about and since when does the fact that others have acted worse make us right when we act the same way? This country was built on the backs of the poor and the subjugated and still is. Also, do you really think life would be better if we had all lost our investments and the money guys had fled the country? I don’t mean to be overly insulting, but where and when in our history has the view of the relationship between Gov’t and business which you expound ever existed but in the minds of those seeking simplistic and emotional solutions to complex problems?
November 19th, 2009 at 10:51 AM
America is too diverse to be evil. Has it acted evilly at times? Absolutely? Has it acted admirably at times? Absolutely. Is it the perfect nation as some wish to believe? Absolutely not.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:54 AM
Madbee!?? Are you really that obtuse? Ciz, I’m all gray, little hair and I creak now and then and I think you are right on most of the time.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:56 AM
If Congress continues on it’s present path it’s all going to come crashing down: the biggest state governments, the federal government, the biggest corporations, the mega-banks, and every other unsustainable entity. And maybe that is the only way the problems will ever get solved. All that will be left is the ingenuity of the individual and his relationship to his neighbors, and those are two sustainable and unstoppable forces.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:58 AM
Madbee, one of your comments was unapproved for the name calling and general incivility of the post.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Spinnwolf, your comment is also pretty uncivil but also refers to a comment that I unapproved because it, too, was uncivil and included name calling.
I hope people will calm down a bit and perhaps stick to issues rather than each other. I do so hate having to use these buttons before 11 a.m. I’m sleepy, people, come on!
November 19th, 2009 at 11:08 AM
There we probably agree. What a ponzi scheme we have & brilliance in a gov’t that says on the one hand, give us your money & we promise it’ll be safe & ready when you need it. Oh, BTW don’t have more than 1.5 - 2 kids per family or we’ll over populate the earth. Now there’s a shining example of ‘2′ opposing goals. But, the mandates in gov’t healthcare will have the same results. It buys them time with SS & Med. but that rivers coming over the banks eventually, because it is not based on good mkt principles. It will be over used & under funded. As Cash/ Clunkers caused me to purchase a new not used car for the first time in 20 yrs. It was financially cheaper to buy new due to the rise in Used Car costs vs financing rates for new over used. That’s green in that it kept more green in my pocket each month, but wasn’t their goal a different kinda green?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:11 AM
Sigh. You guys are reading comments before I can get rid of them. The comments from Madbee and Spinn no longer exist, Jurgen, so I had to get rid of yours, too, though you did nothing wrong. But that’s the general policy.
Carry on.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:15 AM
So who or what entity has been practicing good market principles? Where is or did this this utopia you think we lost and need to get back to ever really exist except when the lights are out and one’s head is on the pillow?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:22 AM
Sam, since each comment does contain a point worthy of discussion, maybe they could stand and be seen for what they are. Just sayin’! We don’t like each other much, obviously, and trying to play whack a mole with the comments may get frustrating. Besides I so want them to hear my new moderated retorts since it is usually the rightness of an opponent’s argument that infuriates the most. There has been nothing infuriating passed here yet–for me anyway.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:23 AM
The FDIC paid much more than they had in their reserves to protect American’s savings in failed banks so they’d be safe and ready.
Dedicating Medicare and S/S funds to their intended purpose,
instead of raiding them for the general fund,
would solve insolvency overnight.
Cash for Clunkers saved jobs and even those new trucks sold that didn’t improve fuel efficiency emit far less pollution than the old ones.
A very successful program that generated far more commerce than it cost in tax money.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:28 AM
Citizen, always with the reasoned response that so infuriates the unreasonable. Waking up again to find that the train is leaving, that they’re left standing on the platform and everyone on the train is smiling must be pretty galling if you are of “that” persuasion.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:30 AM
I meant to ad “and must be like a bad hangover that only a liberal amount of grousing can help one through.”
November 19th, 2009 at 11:33 AM
Jurgen, they simply can’t stand. They violate the rules or they reference a post that no longer exists because it violated the rules. I’m not changing the rules after two years of doing the same thing here, and they’re rules nearly every person here agrees with, even if they do get whacked every so often for a comment.
November 19th, 2009 at 11:34 AM
Also, instead of elimination, as punishment we could have the round heads Gnarful the Garthunk?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:35 AM
Can you hear me bowing and scraping and deferring?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:47 AM
You want more deregulation?
Following the Crash of 1929, one of every five banks in America fails. Many see market speculation engaged in by banks during the 1920s as a cause of the crash.
In 1933, The Glass-Steagall Act passes after Ferdinand Pecora, a politically ambitious former New York City prosecutor, drums up popular support for stronger regulation by hauling bank officials in front of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee to answer for their role in the stock-market crash.
In 1956, the Bank Holding Company Act is passed, extending the restrictions on banks, including that bank holding companies owning two or more banks cannot engage in non-banking activity and cannot buy banks in another state.
In 1999, Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. The repeal enabled commercial lenders such as Citigroup, which was in 1999 the largest U.S. bank by assets, to underwrite and trade instruments such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations and establish so-called structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, that bought those securities.
The argument for preserving Glass–Steagall (as written in 1987):
1. Conflicts of interest characterize the granting of credit — lending — and the use of credit — investing — by the same entity, which led to abuses that originally produced the Act.
2. Depository institutions possess enormous financial power, by virtue of their control of other people’s money; its extent must be limited to ensure soundness and competition in the market for funds, whether loans or investments.
3. Securities activities can be risky, leading to enormous losses. Such losses could threaten the integrity of deposits. In turn, the Government insures deposits and could be required to pay large sums if depository institutions were to collapse as the result of securities losses.
4. Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses. An example is the crash of real estate investment trusts sponsored by bank holding companies (in the 1970s and 1980s).
The argument against preserving the Act (as written in 1987):
1. Depository institutions will now operate in “deregulated” financial markets in which distinctions between loans, securities, and deposits are not well drawn. They are losing market shares to securities firms that are not so strictly regulated, and to foreign financial institutions operating without much restriction from the Act.
2. Conflicts of interest can be prevented by enforcing legislation against them, and by separating the lending and credit functions through forming distinctly separate subsidiaries of financial firms.
3. The securities activities that depository institutions are seeking are both low-risk by their very nature, and would reduce the total risk of organizations offering them – by diversification.
4. In much of the rest of the world, depository institutions operate simultaneously and successfully in both banking and securities markets. Lessons learned from their experience can be applied to our national financial structure and regulation.
I wonder, would we have had a “financial crisis” and trillion dollar bailouts if Glass Steagall was still in place?
November 19th, 2009 at 11:55 AM
Sweet hindsight. We seem to be so much better at it than foresight. Great response E.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:02 PM
I do believe Glass-Steagull was right and does not violate Const. Princ. I also believe that they used gov’t to get around monopoly rules, both of which I support. I also support K.I.S., because the lawyers, lobbyists and politicians have made business/economies & average persons lives too complicated. That’s why the vast majority have tuned out.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:04 PM
If anything, the past year has made everyone tune in.
November 19th, 2009 at 12:04 PM
I hate being scolded so I try to write more circum-spectfully.
Anything’s better than being banned from my favorite addiction.
November 19th, 2009 at 6:09 PM
“Circum-spectfully” I like that. An interesting, meaningful and highly communicative combination of syllables.
As was the “mis-underestimated” of earlier times.
November 19th, 2009 at 7:01 PM
What gets me is that, since the government is finally planning to provide some consumer protection from usurious credit card companies, they’re suddenly raising our rates! Also, in anticipation of a healthcare bill, prescription drug companies raised their prices by 9% this year! As far as I’m concerned, both of these acts should be criminal!
Here are some interesting links:
“Congress blundered badly when it gave the credit card industry as long as 15 months to phase out the deceptive and predatory practices that were outlawed in a new law enacted in May.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/opinion/23fri3.html?scp=4&sq=credit%20cards&st=cse
“In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html?scp=3&sq=prescription%20drug%20prices&st=cse
November 19th, 2009 at 7:06 PM
Also, coming to PBS November 24th, FRONTLINE and The New York Times have joined forces to investigate the changing nature of the consumer credit business.
This is another Lowell Bergman documentary and a sequel to his 2004 documentary “Secret History of the Credit Card,” which you can watch online right here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/credit/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid
November 19th, 2009 at 7:42 PM
I agree that the new credit card rules are a weak joke,
too little too late,
that usury limits could easily have bettered.
Fed Funds - .25% Visa Card - 29% Hmmm.
Increasingly,
legislation always sounds like the people it’s meant to regulate wrote the rules.
Imagine a nation of 30 million having the guts to negotiate drug prices in a way that a nation of 320 million won’t.
Why not?
We have legislation that prohibits it!
November 20th, 2009 at 10:32 AM
If a reform bill (of fannie and freddie) had passed it would have caused a whole different results but because it did not we ended up having to bail the banks out!
“If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.
But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.
That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0
And now we think the same people who got us into this mess are going to fix it, no my friends they are going to make it worst as we are witnessing every day!
AFY!!thesheepdog!!!
November 20th, 2009 at 10:49 AM
When the former Goldman Sachs executive becomes treasury secretary for American taxpayers,
buying out Goldman Sachs’ derivative CBOs becomes a hundred tax pennies to the dollar proposition.
Then Buffett makes a guaranteed 10% dividend,
plus stock options,
on his private investment in Sachs thanks to the taxpayers that work hard to pay their taxes to subsidize him.
Is this a great Country or What!