The first state visit for Obama where there were no protestors
- Thread starter Airport
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Can you document the presence of protestors at BO's visits to other countries? or the lack of protestors in Cuba?
Generally speaking, the less a country allows protestors the fewer protestors there will be. There were protestors in Cuba though.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/
By the way, you probably read that somewhere...that there were protestors everywhere Obama has gone except Cuba. You ought to feel manipulated. Someone somewhere made up nonsense and put it on the Internet hoping that it would spread and you helped them and in the end it's you, not them, that looks bad. We don't even know who they are but under your own screen name post BS because someone who doesn't care what is actually true tries to spread nonsense.
Because they were arrested hours before he arrived?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/
They weren't there when he got there. Kinda proves my point. They weren't protesting the US involvement in Libya, were they? I would hope that everyone on here would agree that Cuba is not someplace that they wished they lived in?
Life is so much easier when you're arguing with straw men. Saying that businesses should be subject to some government regulation is a far cry from saying that government should own all businesses.
Cuba is not the KIND of place they want to live in but it is the place they want to leave. They were protesting the Castro regime. They were removed before Obama got there. They like Obama, or any POTUS, more than they like any of the Castros.
If said regulations encourage risky behavior then don't blame the offender. You and I disagree about who or what brought on the financial collapse. I think govt should stay out of our lives and when they don't, it usually ends up a negative.
Greed compounded with stupidity is a bad thing. Commoditizing high risk loans is not necessarily a bad idea in and of itself. Grading those commodities as a low risk investment is. That wasn't anything the government had a hand in. Those investments becoming worthless is what really drove this collapse. Most of the large banks would have been hurt, but not crippled, if they had to eat their bad loans only. The subprime lenders would have been crippled either way, but that was the quick money business they decided to get into. No one forced them to enter that business, government or otherwise. The insurance of those investments by AIG, an insurance company that employs tons of actuaries (people who assess risk and compute rates for insurance in this case) took the low risk grade at face value, and they charged rates based on that grade. They didn't collect enough in premiums to come close to covering the losses. Again, that wasn't on the government. It strikes me that you are blaming Hitler's mom for getting pregnant when you blame Congress for the collapse.
Airport, you have a tendency to take complicated events and distill them down to a single fault or place for the blame. Things are never that simple, especially in a complex financial system. Was it Congress's fault? Yes, to a degree, but WHICH Congress? GS repeals started way back in '80 and eventually culminated in '99 with GLB.
Government might have encouraged something, but banks didn't have to take it to the extreme that they did (nearly half of new mortgages being sub-prime variable rate mortgages) and Congress never encouraged unregulated derivative trading. That was all on the banks. The unregulated derivative trading had a lot to do with the collapse as well.
You also have to look at the banks and Congress in concert because CitiBank was already in the process of acquiring The Travelers group which is something that should have been illegal. Along comes GLB and suddenly it's legal and that separation between banks and insurers was broken down.
So you're both right to a point.
I think we all do that, WhiteTailEER, as a species of questionably high intelligence. We tends to overgeneralize complex issues and conversely overcomplicate some issues that actually quite simple. Just an opinion based on my life experience to date.
IMO, that doesn't necessarily apply to life in general......but it absolutely applies to Internet Message Boards (especially those pertaining.....or at least mostly so.....to politics)
You're absolutely right. It is my tendency as well, but I try to fight against it. We all bring certain biases to any situation. We can only experience or observe a situation through the prism of our own life's experiences. (egocentric predicament) Those experiences are different for all of us which is why I like this board, and try to be cordial with people to get more of a feel for what things look like through their prism.
I think it's important to recognize this, and when we do empathy comes easier.