last night (FSM, I can haz president who speaks English nao, pleez?) explaining the Wall Street crash (Bill looks damned good these days btw --) and he went, carefully (and twice 'cause he was trying to explain this to Gap-Tooth Duhvit Letterman, here) over how the derivatives and the banking deregulation that allowed ever-thinner margins to arise had contributed to the giant suckitude that was/is Wall Street.

He pointed out that the high-tech stock bubble crashed in 2001. Nobody set out to create a real economy during the first 8 years of this decade (that would be you, W, and your getusmorenow advisors and your tax cuts for the top 1%).

Investors literally had nowhere to put money, except real estate; that was the only growth in the economy. So they found ways to put more money there, to make money off money (instead of off creating jobs, making real products, exploring new sources of energy and working to improve or innovate via technology -- you know, traditional engines of economic growth since the Industrial Revolution).

Physics applies in Politics too, Bill said, (I never swooned over him when he was President, but I've had 8 years of W and hearing a man who speaks English explain economics was such a refreshing change from the current POTUS, I nearly had the vapors) so, as it must, what goes up comes down -- housing prices and markets, in this case, and ... well, you know the rest.

He talked about HOLC.
He talked about repairing and upgrading our infrastructure.
He explained how the subprime mortgage market wasn't the borrowers' fault, but the lenders' (a mortgage for $800 for the first three years, and then it goes up from just paying the interest to a regular mortgage payment per month, only the borrower hasn't gotten a raise and gas and food and electricity and health insurance all cost more now than they did three years ago is how the subprime thing happened, in his explanation), and how that wasn't really the root cause of the collapse. The cause of the collapse was that there were a lot of bad incentives and there weren't any real economic policies aimed at creating jobs, so the sub-prime borrowers could afford their mortgages (and maybe wouldn't've needed a sub-prime anyway, but could've gotten a conventional mortgage if wages hadn't been stagnant).

But the last thing he said was there needed to have been better regulation to prevent the derivatives and swaps.

So yeah, I can see how maybe it would be a good thing not to deregulate health care. Maybe. I mean, what if you had, like, NO oversight on who could practice medicine? Or how it could be practiced? I don't want to get shark-fin or bear-gall concoctions when I need an antibiotic. Do you?

1 John 4:18

how about codifying it with a Constitutional Amendment?

[Apparently not such a goofy idea, it was already proposed by the 107th Congress (2001-2002), see its third bullet point].

overwhelmingly so--HMOs and all private insurers can deny care, payment, coverage, etc--they pretty much do what they want without consequences.