Chimpy's on the Ball!

Bush is getting a briefing today about airline safety.

Glad to see somebody woke up the Baboon King and told him there is an issue.

There is an issue, all right, and the smell of this corpse is wafting from the White House. The problems with the airline industry's maintenance procedures has the same root causes that also brought about spikes in mining accidents and the meltdown in the mortgage industry: The deliberate choice of this Administration to fail to exercise any adult supervision.

Market forces are good at allocating resources and responding to new developments (which is why you see the cable and telecomm industries constantly opposed to open access).

Market forces are not good at all when it comes to product safety or the impact on the rest of the world. Virtually every manufacturer or supplier will, given the opportunity, seek to cut corners or adulterate its product or put a shiny paint job on a turd. They will dump their toxic waste into the ground or the rivers or the air. Safety, whether worker safety or the customers' safety, is the last thing they care about.

The mortgage meltdown was caused by greed. Partly of homeowners, yes, but also of mortgage brokers, who took kickbacks from banks for steering their clients into risky loans, and largely of financial institutions, who secured debt with other debt. It was a huge house of cards and anybody who looked at the whole picture objectively would have seen that all it was going to take was a puff of air to blow it all down. That was the job of the Federal regulators, who were hamstrung by the greedy fucks in the Bush Administration.

The "Bush economic expansion" of the last few years has only benefited the top corporate executives and the super-rich. The only part of it that reached down to the middle class was the housing boom, and that was nothing but a mirage.

But what could we really expect from an Administration that had the economic concerns for the poor and the middle class of the Hoover Administration and the ethical compass of the Harding Administration?