Wall Street seems to rely on some pretty flimsy arguments to justify a laissez faire commodities market.  The most egregious platitudes appear here, where Aaron Brown of Minyanville.  argues that commodities speculation is just like Las Vegas.  It’s a victimless crime he says, because commodity speculation is just like betting on a ball game.  It can’t affect the outcome of the game.  Unfortunately for him, no amount or persiflage can make that analogy work.

The difference is that the the outcome of the game is, in fact, affected by this particular kind of bet.  Speculators buying futures drives up the cost of the futures on which consumers rely to make purchases for the next business cycle.  People that will actually consume the product, oil in the most topical instance, will have to take actual delivery of and pay the price established by speculators for it.  The speculators, meanwhile, have never intended to consume the oil, just to drive up the price and reap a profit from inflating the price themselves and then roll that profit over to further distort the next futures cycle.  As speculator’s money inflates the price of product, there are losers, and those losers are the people who will actually have to pay the futures contract price, take delivery of it and consume it, ultimately the public.  As the law is now, it’s legalized extortion by billionaires.

To a lesser extent, the same activity goes on in the stock market.  A big player can create demand  for a stock by running up the price himself and then selling to the rubes that want to buy a stock that is going up.  There is no one as ruthless as the most ruthless of easy money speculators, and the more money you have the easier it all is.  There’s a lot of money in the hands of the 1% that is up to exactly this kind of mischief.  It would probably do them and the public a great deal of good to surtax some of that back into the real economy.  As it is, big money is just eating away at the economy on which big money depends to make money.  It’s manifestly stupid.

Having the commodities futures market open to non consumers of the product does serve a purpose though.  It helps prevent a big consumer of oil from dominating the market for its own benefit and grabbing up all the product with its purchasing power and reselling it at an artificially high price that it created itself, exactly what outside speculators in oil are doing now.  Again, the people that need the oil are just at the mercy of big money.  This potential and actual behavior by markets is the poster child for government regulation of markets.  Free markets really only work when everyone’s resources and information are the same.

Obama aims to reign in speculation or at least make it a political knuckle ball for a Republican dominated congress to deal with.  It’s fair.  The Republicans who deregulated commodities trading should have to deal with the consequences of that deregulation rather the he.

Republicans aim to cash in politically on the very problems their ideology in policy caused for this nation.  Obama is now in the process of making that obvious.

I can’t speak to the endurance it takes to be black in America today. I can’t know the first hand truths of living as someone in a society with a legacy of hate towards me. I never have.

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Conservatives and their pet judges, as always, fear the slippery slope to more progressive legislation.  The conservative judges argue a slippery slope of government mandating health insurance while their legislative counterparts make law mandating women buy an intentionally punitive vaginal sonogram in order to proceed to a perfectly legal abortion.  At the same time they don’t seem to think turning elections into auctions with victory going to the highest bidder is a slippery slope.  Maybe because Citizens United is more of a free fall than a slope?

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Democracy is all about ideas.  But in order for an idea to enter the market place of ideas, it should have some merit.  Ryan’s latest plan is simply a recycled copy of his last budget plan which was so vehemently rejected by the public the last time that it’s just stupefying that he would re-introduce it.

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Some might consider “Occupy” is late to the cause.  Voices on the left have augured and pined for a public display for a decade or more.  The North African nations led this now global movement to the streets.  They led because they had less cushion to absorb further impoverishment at the hands of global banking and business.  They did show the future though.  How long would it be before an American set himself on fire publically as did Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi, touching off a civil coup de tat of an Arab tyrant, and then another.  “Occupy”, never is, though,  the only too late.

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