Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right

Washington Post ^ | 02/19/2016 | Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries.

[lentulusgracchus]

Hence most of or fellow citizens have decided that the "free market" is a crock.

It started before the 2007-2009 market melt, long before.

The cronyism and back-rubbing began after the 1987 Crash; by 1995 we were hearing whispers about "the Greenspan Put", which gradually coarsened into the money-bombing of "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. Plots against gold, killer Punisher strikes against the commodities market to prop up the dollar and kill the people hedging against Greenspan's/Bernanke's "repression" policies -- the house is crooked, the dice are crooked, the games are rigged. How many ways are there to say it? Goldman Sachs shall be served, and what they are served are the broken and barbecued bodies of savers, investors, and traders. Long live the Great Vampire Squid, and tough luck to everybody else.

[lentulusgracchus]

...they are essentially the only moneyed interest which is resolutely pro-market instead of pro-business.

Not just significant, but a huge distinction -- and trust you to be the one to suss it out and point it out to us.

Subtle but Yuuuuge .... Truth in advocacy, I am an ordoliberal myself, which is all about honest markets and plenty of honest cops to keep elbows out of scales.

To recover honest markets, we'd have to start by making the Fed go away. Goldman and Morgan Stanley have been enjoying the free use of the nation's Black Card since before the market melt of eight years ago, courtesy of "Helicopter Ben".

The Big Short shows us some of the stuff that was going on that the market melt should have corrected and discounted properly, but the Fed and Pres. Bush jumped in to forefend a global bankruptcy (of the biggest banks, true, but not all of them: some 8000 banks in the U.S. that had not been gorging on CMO's and CDS's were unaffected) by throwing a Niagara of public money (TARP) at the biggest banks. As an intended result of TARP, we never achieved genuine price discovery. So we never corrected the excesses of the previous 15 years.

[Grimmy]

re: the constant call for “civility”...

It is a moral failure to ever give commiescum any grace in any way ever on any subject.

The entire program of commiescumism is based on pure bullcrap and is completely destructionist in every aspect of society.

To give any one of them an inch on any issue at any time in any place for any reason is to give them ground that will, eventually, have to be bought back in bloodshed.