Posted on 10/05/2008 6:21:45 AM PDT by vietvet67
My cohort, the sainted Boomer generation, now rules this country and its institutions. The elite of this generation, graduates of the finest schools, cosmopolitan in taste and sensibility, and left-liberal in political and cultural allegiance -- have always been counted the smartest people in the room (just ask them).
Now these new Masters of the Universe have made a shambles of the US and world financial system. This is, to be sure, not the construction put upon things by the main stream media, but it is plainly the case. The current market turmoil is a product of every bad trait the Boomer Elite has long exhibited in other social and political contexts: unbridled greed and hubris, exorbitant self-regard, breathtaking recklessness, insatiable appetite for immediate gratification, and a rollicking sense of entitlement.
We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. Storied investment banks were being run on 40 to 1 leverage. Fancy new securities were designed and widely disseminated whose terms are opaque even to highly knowledgeable and experienced hands. Mortgage securitization techniques were developed which, our bettors assured us, would magically spread risk and thus stabilize the financial system. However, simultaneously with these brilliant innovations, lenders were being forced -- by Boomer Elite congressmen with an aching love of the poor and oppressed unique to themselves -- to loan to uncreditworthy borrowers at subprime rates and without adequate documentation. These loans, packaged into securities together with standard, performing loans, rendered unknowable the value of the securities, leading to mandatory write downs and drastic capital impairment or outright insolvency for many very large firms. Given the high degree of integration of the international financial system, critical destabilization was the real result of this confluence of Master of the Universe genius and Boomer Elite turpitude.
The unwillingness of the rest of us to underwrite the moral excesses of the Boomer Elite perfectly enrages them. So, today, the rest of us are being screamed at. In fact, the barrel of a gun is being pressed to our temple. It is demanded that we play our accustomed role of sheep to the slaughter. We are told we must funnel the better part of a trillion dollars to the fantastically imprudent, self-dealing Wall Streeters that gave us the mess, and that we must also chip in the odd tens of billions more on pet lefty projects with which the Boomer Elite, with characteristic cynicism, lard up the package.
Our efforts to be responsible citizens in this crisis are ridiculed and shouted down: exclude from the bail-out the pork and the payoffs to interest groups? How dare we! Include measures that might actually spur badly needed growth in the tough times now surely coming, like cuts in capital gains and corporate taxes? Leave the room!
This is all merely typical of the smug, cocksure Boomer Elite. This is a group that breaks things. It has set the wrecking ball to institutions that are the essential glue of our society (marriage and the family), the basis of our political system (federalism and the separation of powers), the engine of our prosperity (the free market), the guarantor of our freedom (the military), and the glory of our history (the Constitution, participatory democracy).
Although our Masters of the Universe insist we credit them as moral paragons, they are among the most luxury loving, wealth flaunting population ever seen in the world. Whenever a Hollywood celebutard mouths some perfect imbecility in front of a camera, it is sure to be done from a five star resort hotel or on the red carpet of one of those absurdly frequent self-congratulation festivals. The silk tie, moussed hair crowd on Wall Street is no better. If the extent of the naked short selling, self dealing and market manipulation that has actually gone on these last few years were ever to become generally known, it would indict this crew all by itself. And it cannot be said enough: this crowd is heavily on the left and mostly in the Democratic Party. The cigar chomping, pin-striped caricature of a GOP money man has been false to the Wall Street facts for some time, though the left continues to furiously peddle that image.
The Boomer Elite's tired liberal nostrums are continually falsified by reality but, more and more embittered by the refusal of the world to conform to their dictates, they double down, trying to impose more lefty palliatives upon us, measures sure to be flatly unconstitutional, un-American, and disastrously counterproductive all at once. This is a blindly and viciously destructive cohort. They have degraded our common culture, warped our constitution to suit their purposes, and stand ready to subvert our very nationhood to the pipe dream of the Euro-left. Now they have brought our economy to the brink.
This crisis is, at bottom, about self government in two senses and the Boomer Elite is against both. On the macro level, they don't want the American people to govern themselves under the terms of the Constitution of 1789, preferring to rule over us by anti-democratic means wherever possible, and to the full extent possible. On the micro level, being Rousseau's children, they abjure governing their own appetites, and bid everyone act likewise. The Boomer Elite ideal is a sort of Directorate in the political system and economy, moral anarchy in personal conduct, and a quasi-totalitarian PC regime in societal relations. It is bad character as a manifesto, and tsarism as a mode of governance.
Some of the sane knew it all along, but for many others a stunning realization is only now dawning. Much of the vaunted wealth creation of the last 20 years was a mirage, and the ballyhooed processes of wealth creation were themselves largely a scam, no more than the discounted cash flow of the borrowed future.
We must shudder to think how little of our civilization may remain standing when the Boomer Elite finally, mercifully, passes from the scene.
Dennis Hopper, by the way, has cut his hair and is a strong conservative. SOME folks grow up.
We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of the Boomer Elite outlook and the behavior it spawned. ......We are seeing in the Wall Street implosion the inevitable result of Socialism and the behavior it spawned.There. Fixed it.
Yup, anything to prop-up the Marxist paradigms. Since capitalism and the West have opportunity and wealth they go for ethnicity, race, sex, age, etc. "I'm poor and hungry because you're wealthy and fat." Ergo, "to not be poor and hungry I have to make sure you're no longer wealthy and fat." It's the populist reasoning behind tyranny.
Whatever bad traits my generation brought to American leadership, the FNGs are worse. For every Sarah Palin, there are many. many Barack Obamas. Chicago had William “Big Bill” Coughlin, and now they gave us Barack “The Organizer” Obama.
Last shot: I was not my generation who turned on the fire hoses and let the dogs loose in Selma, Alabama. It wasn’t my generation that created the “Great Society” so that they could buy their way into heaven after all those years of racial injustice, bought the Democrat way, with someone else’s money.
Talkin’ ‘bout my g-g-generation! Right on, brother!
BTW, for all the Boomers here that feel slighted, get a life. This article isn’t about you personally; it’s about the pervasive, self-absorbed character of our cohort (meaning our collective selves). Now go have a good cry and buck-up.
I'd focus more on that than on Marxism. Tyranny can grow from many seeds, most predating Marx.
IMO, conservatives focus far too much on what they are against and far too little on what they should be for. That's why they keep losing.
Most of those you list were born at least 2 generations before the boomers. The generation before the boomers was their parents who went through the Depression and fought WWII then decided they're kids wouldn't go through that and spoiled the little boomer tykes into the monsters they became. When they grew up the self-centered boomers believed the spoiling to be their national entitlement.
As a Boomer, I’d agree that enough bad things can’t be said about the leftist wing of the Boomer generation. But they were never anymore than half, and likely significantly less than half of the generation.
Before I’ve made the statement that, during the ‘60s, it was the Greatest Generation ‘journalists’ holding a microphone in front of a zonked out hippie, or some raging anti-war nutcase, and pretending those maladjusted characters had some great wisdom to impart to the world. The GG put the hippies and anti-war protesters and underminers on the evening news and treated them like great pillars of knowledge and wisdom.
And, many of the changes in laws, and in education and school curriculums, and the tearing down of traditional values, all this started when the GG held most all the power and influence in American society. The Boomers never really came to power until 1992 with the election of Slick Willie. Of course, they’d been steadily entering more positions of power and influence before then, but the GG held the reigns of power well into the 1980s, and vast changes in traditional values and institutions had taken place by that time.
So, this deconstruction of America didn’t start with the Boomers and it won’t end with them. Lots of shortsighted, wishful thinking going on if anyone believes the end of Boomer dominance in society will really change much. It’s also Boomers who fought and held back many of these trends. The Boomers were something near a 50/50 generation when it came to supporting or going against the trends discussed in the article, just as the entire country seems to be on most issues today.
Sing it with me: One of these things isn't like the others!
Jew? Race (and a religion and a culture).
Black? Race.
Irish? Race.
Italian? Race.
Boomer? Not a race!
"Boomer" refers to a generation of American's that were born and came of age in a very unique period of American history. That uniqueness allowed them to grow up without being tested and trained for life's grim reality.
You can think of the Boomers as trust fund babies that suddenly got their money taken away from them.
No I can't. I've experienced people from eras before and after the Boomers and I say you speak from ignorance.
I have to join CA on this one ... what, precisely, are you trying to say ? As it stands, your post is one of the dumbest I’ve read on this thread. Ever.
What precisely is your question? This thread hasn't been here ever.
You're right. I'm only in my mid-to-late twenties and my financial house is in good shape. Could use more insurance, tho.
So, yeah, you're right: I'm speaking from ignorance. :)
Xer Ping
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
I would be interested to know what Rangel said after his comment about we shouldn’t be talking about the warnings.
Bet his next comment was blaming the Republicans..
And I'm 63. And I was born into a country that had recently experienced the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, Prohibition, the rise of various socialist and fascist and anarchist groups and the Klan and the Nation of Islam and Jim Crow and Cosa Nostra, violent labor strife, veterans marching on Washington, eugenics, alcohol and drug abuse, crooked politicians and judges and police and...well, people being people.
We can all agree Obama will be a disaster for business except the drug trade. With unemployment soaring to 20-30% people will turn to drugs for relief and profit. Of course, law enforcement will grow in it's participation of the larger drug trade. Chicago style payoffs will be Obama's contribution to American history.
The violence associated with America's big business will be nightmarish. The hoods from prohibition will look like boy scouts compared to the thugs of Obama'a America.
I am frightened.
“The current market turmoil is a product of every bad trait the Boomer Elite has long exhibited in other social and political contexts: unbridled greed and hubris, exorbitant self-regard, breathtaking recklessness, insatiable appetite for immediate gratification, and a rollicking sense of entitlement.”
Unbridled greed and others mentioned are part of human nature and is never bad. In normal market conditions it is leveled out by people who jump in on the opportunity. Bad is to monopolize the mortgage market under the protection of the Federal Government. Bad is to attract money with government guarantee below fair market value or even Libor. Bad is to hand over mortgages to people who can’t afford it at low rates and no added risk premiums (e.g. non-market prices). Bad is to put a bailout of $700B in place to cover some as holes.
It is not market forces that brought us at peril. It’s the SOCIALIST SOCIAL ENGENEERING that did. Every time we have a party like this someone will end up doing the dishes. Usually the some ones are the more responsible ones that are put on the spot. The ones that have their house in order, since they are the ones that have something spare to be taken. These some ones, usually middle-class ordinary people like you and me, never seem to learn their lessons.
Dems always were and will always be a disgrace. In the name of helping some, they put more at risk now even to the scale of the world economy. But wasn’t this their goal in the first place. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!
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