Why the tea parties don't matter

[bovil]

The "Tea Party" movement is a symbolic failure.

The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.

The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.

So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.

If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.

But they're not.

Pussies.

Comments

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

I think some of the stuff FDR tried to do was evil. Put "packing the Supreme Court" right at the top of the list. It's not a small list, either. But neither was everything he did bad - though some, in retrospect, made things worse, not better. Hindsight is 20/20, and we can learn both from his successes and his failures. Problem is, we're ignoring a bunch of lessons, both from FDR and from other, similar scale messes (JAPAN).

I'm not so sure I prefer the equity option for TARP. Frankly, I've been looking at what the banks refer to as "toxic assets" and drooling. At book rate, wouldn't touch 'em. Discount 'em so they'll market, and there's frankly a LOT of money to be made. I've been offered multi-million $ portfolios of bad debt that I would have _loved_ to buy, at the price offered (70% discount from face). I could have kept, oh, 80-90% of those people in their homes, and _still_ made money hand over fist. Didn't have the $16m required to play. But if I can do it, you're damn skippy the feds could to. They could _make a profit_ on the deal even. Instead, we got the worst of both worlds - no unfrozen credit, but huge raids on the public fisc.

The value of your house, to be quite honest, has depressed enough to get it back into reality. Overall, long-term growth average for Bay Area real estate is right about 7%. And in that I'm talking about a 100 year average. So if you got 3-4 years of 20-40% growth... why don't you think you'll have to cough it up?
[more]

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's really toxic paper; the real estate is just fine, it's just not worth what the bank has in it.

I actually understand that the market value of my house has dropped from insane to merely absurd. I moved to CA from the midwest, where my place would be valued at maybe $60k, even in a big city. Prop 13 and population pressure has had very odd results on the economy of the housing market.

Still, flooding the market with discounted "toxic assets" would depress it even further.

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Not really. You might note that real estate sales right now are booming... because prices have come down to something reasonable.

And yes, Bay Area real estate takes a little getting used to. One thing I have to point out to many people is that where, in most cities, you would have an urban core, we have water. Most cities have, essentially, a bell curve for valuations. Ours is a wierd annulus, due to our oddly-constrained geography.