A Lack Of Connectivity

The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 10th, 2010


Observations:


1) Maria Bartiromo, gets it right, but gets it wrong. Four other people are sitting at the table telling her that a sub $100k career professional is no match to regulate a $1 million dollar executive armed with a $5 million dollar lobbyist, that its not a fair fight, and she stays on her CNBC-wide take that the little guy is the guy who is to blame for the financial meltdown and the oil spill.


Yes, MMS is entirely at fault for working as a sub-agency of the oil companies, in fact it's an industry shuffling it’s own executives in and out of the regulatory facility as regulators sort’ve like the executive on loan program at the United Way.


Yes, 400 government agencies we’re meant to combine to regulate AIG.


But is this the perpetuation of the American way that when things go wrong don’t blame the shooter, blame society?


Rick Santelli’s now famous meltdown on CNBC claiming the mortgage crisis is 100 million bad American borrowers with blood on their hands got a wonderful companion piece today when Maria insisted that crises in America are the fault of bad regulators and thus business should be free to drive the economy until such a time as those bad regulators step up to do their job.


While on it’s surface, the Elizabeth Warren segment seemed like an acknowledgment that Maria was on to something, if you think Warren isn’t looking to fix how government keeps us safe from economic predation, you and Maria should scoot yourselves right on over to GoldNow.com and SurvivalGuns.com and stock up. Goldman Sachs did, because they still think they’re going to get away with it.


There is zero equity in regulation. Repeat. There is zero equity in regulation.


2) Elizabeth Warren made a case today that what financial regulation will accomplish is to help all these disparate regulators connect the dots to monitor our financial system. Erin Burnett, made the same case s short while later, that should the details be brought to light, it would be harder for a regulator to turn his head for profit as an executive on loan from the industry he is meant to control. Ok, I added the turn the head part, but Erin did say bring the details up one level.


This overview of how financial regulation should work sounds remarkably like the reforms made to our intelligence community after the attacks of September 11th. There needed to be a critical connect the dots infrastructure added to prevent separate agencies from allowing our enemies to attack us at the blind spots where we don’t connect. Now we have to protect ourselves from our own corporations exploiting gaps in existing regulatory structure.


The funny thing is, we have just hired our 4th Director of National Intelligence in the 5 years since the intelligence reforms went into effect, and the Christmas day attack demonstrated that inter-connectivity is still a dream unrealized in the intelligence community.


Now this is a hard comparison, but you can (sometimes) rebuild the damage from an attack, and regenerate lost populations from an attack, but let us never forget that if the sky ever fell financially, like it did in the great depression, we as a world population are just not equipped to for those ramifications.


When it happened last time, the vacuum the financial crisis created led us to World War and Cold War. Interestingly enough, the world population at that time had about 300% more self sufficiency than they do now, they were able to grow and raise their food and weren’t bound by an oil based transportation grid.


We are far more susceptible to a catastrophic interruption to society currently, should our global economy become disabled significantly.


Do you feel like anyone is explaining the stakes of the game to you? Those in charge of governing are as afraid of pitchforks as the Wall Street community, and they all have a vested interest in the gravy train as it is.


3) Did anyone else noticed that the 12 people deemed most responsible for the oil spill by Time Magazine did not include Sarah Palin and “drill, baby, drill” as a national mantra. They glossed over that omission by making the American driver the number 7 culprit. Further, somehow they got Sarah Palin to participate in an issue of Time devoted to the perils of oil consumption and aggressive extraction?


Were her publicist and strategist on vacation when that happened? That is the only way that could’ve transpired as witnessed.


That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.