Discussion: Noah: After 6 Years Of Gun Control Debate, Only 'Major Change' Is To Obama's Face (VIDEO)

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Darcy, I share your frustration about the sluggish recovery, but you also have to consider other factors besides President Obama.

The Democrats lost the House two years after Obama’s election. Since spending and tax policy originates in the House, there’s little the Democrats can do to initiate those policies.

The majority of the states are led by Republicans, and they have pursued an anti-stimulus policy in recent years, cutting government spending, and raising sales taxes and fees to make up for corporate state income tax cuts – which hit working poor and middle-class citizens in the pocketbook while benefiting the wealthier class of citizens. These state policies have largely offset whatever stimulus Obama and the Congressional Democrats were able to implement from 2009 - 2010.

EDIT TO ADD: Another stimulative measure Republicans could do at the state level is approve a Medicaid expansion, since that would inject federal dollars into the local economy and create demand for additional jobs. But many Republican-led states still have failed to do so.

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What is your point? That Obama didn’t…what? Sign an executive order to do more research into smart gun technology and research how we can better work with law enforcement? An executive order to encourage gun manufacturers to do what? More research. And create smart guns, as mentioned more than once above.

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Mr Wonderful just created 211,000 new jobs in November. Also, the Republicans couldn’t hold their own dicks if Obama handed it to them. What planet are you smoking?

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Please stop flagging these posts as off-topic. Sometimes legitimate conversations take place in the unlikeliest places.

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Has to be a new person. That goes on all over the Hive.

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Do not feed the fucking trolls.

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It’s our way of communicating. Mind your own business.

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Agree with much of what you say Randy but remember Obama made his own bed with a Stimulus Package 2009 that was not nearly aggressive enough with 40% in tax cuts and only 66 billion for transportation and infrastructure (of a total 787 billion). He created his own problems and when he brought in the 13 largest bank CEO’s to the WH right after the settling for a tepid Stimulus Package, he famously told them “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” And for the first time since President Roosevelt the WH held all the leverage against the banks. He then proceeded to bail them out. And they in turn went back to their old ways and have been screwing the country since while stuffing their own pockets with hundreds of billions in QE and seven years of ZIRP. Obama did nothing.

Yes, once he lost his majority in the House to the TP he was indeed screwed. But his earlier mistakes were his own and we are still paying for them.

Regarding Medicaid + and Medicare: to blame it out intransigence from red states is also giving Obama a pass. No one saw this coming?

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Obama will be remembered for many things, but mostly for how he steered us out of disaster’s way when he was just coming onboard. Since most critics of his approach to pulling us off the ledge don’t have an alternative set of remedies- which numbered in the hundreds and had to be administered around the world around the clock. it’s of little use to contemplate what if one or even a few such remedies took on a different hue. The fact that he pulled this off amid the animus and vitriol spewing from the losers from the GOP is even more remarkable.

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I understand the resentment about the bankers, but remember the financial sector was reeling after getting burned after taking all those insane risks with speculative investments.

And for better or worse, if the bankers had gone down, we would have gone down with them. So the Obama administration was concerned with restoring the financial sector back to health, and then regulating them so as to avoid a repeat of the crisis and bailout, as part of the wider effort to revive the economy.

Recall that FDR did not convict any more bankers than Obama had; like Obama he was a reformer and not an avenger.

Maybe he could have been more aggressive, but it’s also likely that the crisis was much worse than reported at the time. We now know that the Fed was involved in interventative measures as early as early 2007, and had hoped to contain the crisis before it had snowballed in 2008.

And it cannot be said that the bankers returned to their own ways. Their ability to invest proprietary funds are now limited, and they must now hold higher reserves than before, and also undergo regular stress tests to simulate their ability to withstand a future financial crisis. All of these measures have forced them to be more prudent and made their operations more sustainable.

Many believed the stimulus was all that could be obtained in the prevailing atmosphere of existing sticker shock over the recent $800 billion TARP bailout and the ginned-up hysteria over continued government spending. Maybe they could have done more, but at the time Nancy Pelosi herself said she couldn’t see the likelihood of passing more than a $200 billion stimulus.

As far as Medicaid, the ACA did require the states to expand it; it was the Supreme Court that made that optional.

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“What is your point? That Obama didn’t…what?”

The point being is the federal government is the biggest, by far, customer to the gun makers. This administration does nothing but bitch at the NRA when their real leverage is over the manufacturers. Why they don’t demand anything from them is startling. Manufacturers have pissed away tax payer money for years researching smart guns and have come up with one lame excuse after another - can’t work. 40% of their revenue comes from government purchases - year in and out. Why this administration refuses to squeeze these bastards to make guns safer is beyond me. The technology has already been proven and is in use. Obama treats these gun makers like he treats the banks as if they’re some sacred fucking cow. He’s been on TV 16 times now saying “enough is enough” yet refuses for whatever reason to call out the gun industry. WHY?

Here’s what another president publically said and did in a similar crisis:

In April 1962, when U.S. Steel and five other steel corporations unilaterally decided to jack up their prices and squelch an intricate set of compromises that the Kennedy Administration had expended a great deal of effort in negotiating, President John F. Kennedy responded with an aggressive counter attack that shocked the Washington press establishment. He turned loose his younger brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who subpoenaed the expense accounts of the top steel executives and dispatched F.B.I. agents to “interview” them. Robert Kennedy also sent the not-so-subtle message that the Justice Department and its Anti-Trust Division, along with the Internal Revenue Service, were about to make the executives’ lives miserable unless they honored their original agreement with the White House and the labor unions to maintain prices.

In an April 11, 1962 press conference, Kennedy called the price hikes “a wholly unjustifiable and irresponsible defiance of the public interest.” He criticized “a tiny handful of steel executives whose pursuit of power and profit exceeds their sense of public responsibility.” The execs had “utter contempt” for the U.S., Kennedy said.

Could you ever imagine Obama ever taking such a stand against the gun manufacturers? Ever? This is his last chance at leadership. When he says “enough is enough” the gun makers, the NRA and the Republican Party simply snicker, knowing he will not take the necessary drastic action required to contain the madness of guns griping our nation.

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“I understand the resentment about the bankers, but remember the financial sector was reeling after getting burned after taking all those insane risks with speculative investments.”

Come on Randy, they burned themselves!

“Recall that FDR did not convict any more bankers than Obama had; like Obama he was a reformer and not an avenger.”

Where do you come up with this stuff? Roosevelt didn’t have to put anyone in jail. He broke up the three largest monopolies that literally ran this country. They had 100 times more power than the banks in '08 did. The Treasury use to call J.P. Morgan to borrow money! And Obama gets nothing in return in bailing out the banks? Nothing. And no one goes to jail.

"And it cannot be said that the bankers returned to their own ways. Their ability to invest proprietary funds are now limited, "

Really? They’re bigger than ever and the derivative scam is still flourishing, So now they have a few restrictions on their leveraging but their behavior is still the same and has been for seven years.

“As far as Medicaid, the ACA did require the states to expand it; it was the Supreme Court that made that optional.”

Is it ever Obama’s fault? The SC decision was after the fact. These 38 red states had already refused to set up state exchanges and had no intention of ever doing so.

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I agree that the banks have no one to blame for their actions but themselves, but you can’t deny that their actions only came after decades of deregulation of the finance industry, which made much of what they did legal.

The administration responded by re-regulating the sector.

And Dodd-Frank reform has had an impact: Systemically large (“too big to fail”) financial entities are facing greater scrutiny, banks must meet higher reserve ratios, pass stress tests, and make out ‘living wills’ in the event of their failure, the Volcker Rule limits proprietary trading by banks, and a consumer financial protection bureau roots out fraud and abuse.

And Dodd-Frank regulates not just the commercial banks but the entire financial sector. It is one reason why General Electric is selling its financial arm – GE Capital – to avoid the scrutiny and tighter regulations imposed on Too Big To Fail institutions.

And it’s why Metropolitan Life Insurance – Metlife, with the cute commercial featuring Snoopy – is fighting its designation as a Too Big To Fail institution by the federal government.

So, you can credit Obama for ‘breaking up’ GE’s huge $200 billion financial conglomerate – which does not even include their credit card division, which will also be sold for additional billions – and for putting the pressure on the financial powerhouse Metlife.

And that’s the idea behind the Dodd-Frank stealth sledgehammer: the larger the bank, the more stringent the regulations. Instead of busting them up, we’ll encourage them to separate. Some mega-banks are already considering spinning off divisions to get out from under the scrutiny.

You can also credit Obama for squeezing more than $150 billion in fines and penalties from the banks, and for squeezing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for more than $200 billion.

Lehman Brothers’ collapse, and the failures of Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and Countryside – among the most active sellers of exploitative sub-prime mortgages, and none of them in the Top 10 – led to a panic which resulted in the Crash. When these firms collapsed, the government prevailed upon the biggest banks to absorb them so as to contain some of the damage caused by a systemic failure – which partly accounts for the fact that some of the largest financial institutions are now larger than they were in 2008.

Yes, what JFK did with the steel companies was brave, and in the same vein of what President Obama did in the aftermath of the Gulf oil spill: call for a multi-billion damage pool to avoid a replay of the Exxon Valdez aftermath, which dragged on in court for 20 years after which a judge decimated the initial damage award.

Also brave was getting the U.S. auto firms to double fuel economy in their cars and trucks over the next decade, and issuing regulations limiting emissions in coal-powered electric power plants.

The state exchanges are for the purchase of private insurance and are separate from Mediaid, which is a true single-payer system for the poor and working poor. And for what it’s worth, several Republican-led states have agreed to expand Medicaid.

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Listening to my senator, Lindsay Graham, try to explain his vote made me want to throw up. He said we couldn’t be sure the government wouldn’t make a mistake when putting an individual on a watch list. If that happened we’d be taking a civil right away from someone. Funny, they don’t mind taking the right to votee away from people. They’re fine with mistakes being made on the voting rolls. But caution with a watch list is just too much for them. These assholes will twist themselves into a pretzel trying to explain their idiot positions. It’s a no-brainer. People on watch lists shouldn’t be able to purchase guns. That’s an easy place to start and then go from there. These GOP Congressmen have no morals. Sadly, there are a lot of idiots who buy the shit they sell.

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“I agree that the banks have no one to blame for their actions but themselves, but you can’t deny that their actions only came after decades of deregulation of the finance industry, which made much of what they did legal.”

“The administration responded by re-regulating the sector.”

Bill Black talked about that in an interview. He said there were about 500 FBI white collar specialists investigating WS and banking fraud just as Bush won the WH. And when 911 happened the Justice Dept transferred almost all of them to national terrorism. Bush & Friends saw this as an opportunity to not replace any of them, and in 2004 we had the FBI declare publically there was a mortgage fraud epidemic.

The Kennedy example required WH overreach for sure and Kennedy was criticized roundly for it by the ACLU as was Judge Sirica when he presiding over the plumber’s trial. When he realized the case was slipping away from the government prosecutors he became an “activist” judge and directed much of the questioning himself. And the ACLU screamed murder.

Obama has to do the same against the gun manufacturers. And in so doing he has to take on the gun culture.

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Could be, there has been talk that Obama might issue an EO on guns.

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I know the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was at the center of that issue. There is no such breach in the case of firearms manufacturers.
Donald Trump might try to swing his way into a deal like the one you describe above, but his swagger, like Bush 43’s talk about “Jawboning” OPEC to lower the price of crude oil back in 2000, would be as effective as if he didn’t say anything at all.

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“I know the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was at the center of that issue. There is no such breach in the case of firearms manufacturers.”

You’re right about that.

Then there’s this angle: aside from federal purchasing power there’s also state and local law enforcement agencies making large purchases. Major gun manufacturers depend on these taxpayer-funded purchases. For the government to keep buying guns from these companies — purchases meant to ensure public safety — without making demands for change is also squandering its leverage.

Put it on the ballot in very blue states like Rove did with gay rights in his red states when Kerry was challenging Bush for the presidency. Flip the optics is the term I think.

Don’t know where I found this but it’s also a potential option:

The president can push companies to compete in the area of safer guns and more responsible distribution. Here’s how to start.

First, use federal purchasing power to begin a substantive conversation with gun manufacturers. The Pentagon is in the process of selecting the provider of handguns for the United States Army. It should require all bidders to provide detailed information about their gun safety technologies and distribution practices in the civilian market. No response, no contract.

It’s time to do battle. Hate to phrase it that way but the time is now when the public is desperate for a solution. Even putting a plan in place, squeezing manufacturers, would make a difference.

Think about it: are you afraid to sit in a crowded movie theater on a Saturday night?

All because a bunch of yahoos are yelling “I want my MTV”

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“Could be, there has been talk that Obama might issue an EO on guns.”

Opportunity knocks. We’re definitely at a crossroads on so many issues in this country. This could be the catalyst.

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Agree, and it also might make good political sense, since it would fire up on-the-fence and apathetic voters that Obama is finally doing something about this.

Interesting idea on how the government can use its leverage, represented by its buying power, on gun makers.

Interestingly, I had included in my previous post upthread about how Bush had decimated enforcement of white-collar crime and loosened mortgage lending requirements as part of his Ownership Society initiative, but I deleted it as my post – as so often – got too long. Good to see you picked up on the same idea.

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