For me, it reminds me of the economy.
First, we have a large warehouse, looking good, crammed with supplies. Two years ago, our economy was looking good. Crammed with equity, the Dow Jones Industrials Index approached 15,000. We had a strong dollar.
That bulging warehouse also represents the housing bubble. Contractors couldn't fulfill all their orders to build new houses that even lower-middle class folks were "buying", thanks to rules that Barney Frank and his gay lover helped establish. Housing prices shot up as demand from live-in-it buyers and investment buyers dueled in the marketplace. The "value" in those newly-expensive homes was used to further pump up the economy.
Life was good.
But, like the bulging warehouse, our economy had not been filled with much regard to how it had to be used. "Leverage" (over-extension of collateral) had been used to fill it, and new equities were stacked on top of each other by the hedge funds and large trusts.
In the warehouse, the forklift operator tries to maneuver his vehicle, carrying the load the wide way instead of stacked vertically and strapped to the lift (which would have taken him much longer to arrange), and driving the machine and it's 96 inch load down an aisle about 92 inches wide without a spotter.
In the economy, all sorts of people went to Barney Frank and told him the wrong people were buying houses, and the Federal Government, plus the banks, could be badly hurt if there was the slightest pause in the economy. Barney Frank blew them all off (figure of speech only). He didn't listen to wise professors such as Nouriel Roubini or the pleas of the Bush Administration (who didn't make those pleas very emphatically, either). Then, a bonehead driving a too-wide load came through the economy (oil traders and buyers of the speculative futures contracts such as T. Boone Pickens) caused a hitch in the economy. Safety was ignored, no "spotter" was used to maneuver through the overstressed and overloaded area, and the collapse of the economy is now in the history books.
Now, Barney Frank wants to find that forklift operator and toss him into the clink. "Somebody" screwed up this economy and "somebody" has to pay. Yeah, right.
Barney Frank needs only to look in the mirror. The person responsible for that disaster in the warehouse video is the warehouse manager, who failed to supervise the correct construction of the storage shelves, failed to supervise the correct placement of the floor-stored materials and failed to require that the forklift operator follow common rules of operator safety. That warehouse manager had what we call "oversight responsibility", and so did Barney Frank.
The person responsible for the economic collapse is the oversight manager of the economy, and Barney Frank himself has told us many times that HE is "the man" (figure of speech ONLY).
For the first time since he was a little boy, Barney Frank needs to actually "man up" now, and admit he managed our economy wrong, admit that his oversight was not only poor, but it actually encouraged all the wrong things in that overloaded, underfunded, overheated economy.
Barney Frank should go to prison if anyone goes. At least Barney Frank will have a very good idea of what to do for entertainment when he gets there.
Hat tips to both the EllTee for the video and PawPaw for his excellent post on Barney Frank. Both gentlemen made it very easy to write this post.
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