When Talking About The Economy Now And The So Called 'Capitalism Practiced' Start Calling It Exactly What It Is, "Reaganomics", i.e. 'trickle down' 'free market'............, there's a hole host of meme's used that sold this Con of what must be in order to advance? which when implemented was forecast by many then and over the years, last couple of decades, to do Exactly What It Did, Collapse The Once Growing and Proud Economic Reality That Was!!
Have no idea why those who are supposed to represent the working people don't use the reality and voice it over and over, do know why th media don't, they profit from not reporting the reality!
Just two days after announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, President Obama held a jobs summit:
With unemployment levels above 10 percent, Obama said "We cannot hang back and hope for the best."
But, mindful of growing anxiety about federal deficits, Obama also tempered his upbeat talk with an acknowledgment that government resources could only go so far and that it is primarily up to the private sector to create large numbers of new jobs.
He said while he's "open to every demonstrably good idea ... we also though have to face the fact that our resources are limited."
Beyond the question of why a Democratic president is giving lip service to deficit hawks at a moment that screams for more Keynesian stimulus, the real question is this: why is it that we have to endure nearly a year of grueling political games just to get a weak, watered down health care bill that we have been told, all along, has to be deficit-neutral, yet no one bats an eye at throwing tens of billions more each year into wars?
My things seem chill here. Everybody seems to be in a groovy frame of mind, maybe it's the holidays, maybe we're all just high on cold medicines (I know I am, I've got a nasty one), maybe it's just longer nights and the shorter days ....
But too bad. I'm gonna hit you over the head with an article that will PISS YOU THE HELL OFF.
Thomas Ferguson is a political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within an historical perspective. He is a Political Science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a contributing editor of The Nation, and is also the author of several books, the most recent of which is Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System.
Back in April 2009 Ferguson was interviewed by Real News CEO Paul Jay, and at the time called the Obama/Geithner/Summers economic/stimulus plans a "recipe for disaster".
Today, Ferguson again talks with Jay, and with the hindsight of the past 7 months now says that the stimulus program was far too small, a much larger one is still needed, and predicts that the Democrats must start a new jobs program to bring the economic growth to the bulk of the population or face losing badly in the 2010 mid-terms.
We strive to be, if anything, a participatory space around here, and I've had a question come to my inbox that is very much deserving of our attention.
To make a long story short, our questioner wants to know why, on the one hand, despite the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, also known as the "stimulus"), unemployment in the construction industry continues to increase, and, on the other hand, why there is such a giant disparity, on a state-by-state basis, in the cost of saving a job?
They're great questions, and, having done a bit of research, I think I have some cogent answers.
Now that the Great Recession has been declared dead and gone by everyone who failed to see the possibility of it happening in the first place, it is important to examine the reasons for its demise.
The White House has been busy declaring that its Stimulus policies have created or saved 640,000 jobs. We should note that the White House originally claimed credit for 1 million jobs, and only revised them down after realizing that they are spending $234,000 for each job saved. More revisions are sure to come.
It's also important to note that the job number is based on mathematical calculations and is impossible to prove.
One thing that can't be denied is that the stimulus did have an effect on the economy. It's this impact that needs to be examined further.
There are times for ideological fights, this the Dog believes with his entire heart. The issue is when to pick these fights. There is an argument that it is the best time when things are in crisis. The thinking on this, such as it is, is that when things are bad you need to be most correct in your actions. Of course this is what we are seeing from the Republican Party in general right now, and from anti-stimulus Governors in particular. It is also a complete fallacy. In times of crisis you need to have already decided the plan of action and act on it. If you are wise you will have planed and thought and argued prior to the crisis, but that is a rare trait in the America of the early 21st Century.
It does not matter if you personally like or dislike Obama. You need to sign this petition and flood his e-mail box with e-mails that tell him that, even if the House passes this bill, he needs to veto it. It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If the government gives benefits to 'illegal' aliens who have never contributed, where does that leave those of us who have paid into Social Security all our working lives?
As stated below, the Senate voted this week to allow 'illegal' aliens access to Social Security benefits.
Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition that requires citizenship for eligibility to that social service.
Instructions are below. If you don't forward the petition and just stop it, we will lose all these names.
If you do not want to sign it, please just forward it to everyone you know.
Thank you!
To add your name, click on 'forward'. Address it to all of your email correspondents, add your name to the list and send it on.
When the petition hits 1,000, send it to comment@whitehouse.gov
Yes that's right. There never was supposed to be another great depression. It was never gonna happen. The rich guys were way too smart to ever let anything like that happen. This was part of the first advice I ever received about how to plan my finances for life. Sitting on the front porch in Bridgewater in the Spring of 1975 at the ripe age of 23, my new financial guru, kindly providing his services as a benefit of my employment, went on for quite a while about how the bankers and politicians had learned their lesson very well and that there would "never, no way, ever, be another Great Depression."
He is in grave danger of being wrong. Thirty-three years later we find ourselves at the precipice. We are in an economic crisis that is looking so deep and so wide that no one really understands it, and no one knows how to get us out of it. Our leaders have a plan and they are trying to implement it but the going is slow. Will the new law now going into affect slow the fall enough so that we can pull ourselves out of it? The reviews are mixed. There is a lot of debate and shouting on both sides. Can we spend ourselves out of the ditch we're in?
I have but one question for the Obama loyalists. Do you guys ever get tired of saluting the flag? Just because we support Obama and all agree he was 1,000 10 times better than anyone else running doesn't mean we have to put our brains on a shelf.
Why did he lie to us, and why aren't the Democrats holding him accountable? We are not stupid. We can see what is going on. All this distraction about bi-partisanship as if millions of unemployed, broke, and homeless middle class Americans care.
No salary caps for CEOs. No torturers, war profiteers, or WS crooks going to jail. Just lots of hot air surrounded by smoke and mirrors.
How about a truth commission on the bailout?
I shouldn't be surprised by now. But I still was when I read the article this morning in the Washington Post explaining that the cap on executive pay has been removed from the stimulus bill. I knew what Congress was doing yesterday by bringing the Wall Street executives in and scolding them in public was a dog and pony show. But I had not realized how profoundly full of shit these politicians are.
Nationalize the damned banks already. They're stealing us blind. Geithner is a WS insider, and the wrong man for this job. If we aren't getting tax dodger and Republican appointments, we are getting the cat assigned to guard the canary. If I have to bailout their sorry asses, I want to own them.
While we are at it, who did us this favor?
A Sanders-Grassley amendment to demand TARP recipient banks stop firing U.S. workers and replacing them with foreign guest workers was ripped out of the bill.
Last but not least, what's all this noise about Obama and Social Security? We can pay for the Bush war profiteers and the ongoing WS bailout of Washington's financiers and cronies, but they, by god, are going to save us from the burden of social security.
You have no idea how bad Democrats are starting to look on the heels of all that campaign rhetoric. Change my ass! I am getting sick and tired of all of them and the horses they rode in on.
Welcome everyone to the latest edition in the Manufacturing series. I do hope everyone is doing better than our economy. The President was on television talking about jobs. He had visited a town in Indiana where the unemployment rate had reached 18%. The stimulus plan being laid before us, President Obama hopes, will eventually lead to several million jobs. But before we get to the latest on jobs and manufacturing, let's look at this week's Numbers.
The disparity in wealth in this country is obscene, and the failure to restrain the mindless and monumental greed that led to it has been our downfall.
The income of the 400 wealthiest Americans swelled in 2006, soaring nearly 23 percent from the previous year, to an average of $263 million, according to data released Thursday by the Internal Revenue Service. Since 1996, this group has nearly doubled its share of all income earned in the United States.
The top 400 paid just more than $18 billion in federal income taxes in 2006, or an average of $45 million, on a record $105 billion in total income - the lowest effective tax rate in the 15 years since the agency began releasing such data.
The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.
A cycle pushing us into a self reinforcing deflationary spiral in which less and less people are able to support the dwindling economy with their purchases which causes even more job loss and less economic activity, and so on, as we saw highlighted in very sharp focus in How Bad? This Bad with the graph from Swampland compiled using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that:
...compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession -- showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been. Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs - and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.
By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.
The response from the government so far, from the Bush administration and the Congress, and continuing through into the new Obama administration, has been attempts at bailouts of the very wealthy in the financial sector, through shoveling money at manufacturers such as the auto industry so they can continue producing products in the face of crippling reductions in sales revenues, effectively "stealing" money from their prospective customers who were already more and more unable to buy their products, to finally with the current administration to an ostensible "stimulus" bill supposedly aimed at "creating" jobs.
All of which has been and is being done by saddling taxpayers, the very people these attempts have been ostensibly aimed at "helping" with long-debunked "trickle down" economics, with enormous and growing crushing future debt and thus crippling their future as well as present ability to purchase products and services, and crippling future prospects for an economic recovery.
One thing about the New Deal is that it was well documented. Some of the best photographers of the day were hired by Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration. Lewis Hine worked for the TVA/CCC.
Pretty much every New Deal agency sent photographers out to document both the need for their activities, and also the results. There's some terrific photographs which don't have the artist identified. And I do mean artist.
Back in the days of the New Deal, there was a lot of emphasis on work. On labor actually. Organized labor was a force, and the powers that be were worried about insurrection from the left in the US. So it's not surprising that work is depicted in an heroic light.
In light of the debates over what is or isn't worthy of inclusion in the stimulus package, I thought it might be interesting to look at work in FDR's day.
Just a whimsical post this morning. Several things of varying importance have occurred to me in passing this week. I review the importance of Flag Pins, shirt sleeves and a new description of the Republican strategy for defeating the stimulus package. You also might want to check out the new word I found to "pin" on Republicans. I share below the Fold. Enjoy!
The message was heard and is being acted on. Barack Obama and his administration-to-be has been listening to Democrats and now is revising the stimulus plan.
Emerging from a two-hour meeting in the Capitol with Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, Senate Democrats praised the President-elect's team for agreeing to make changes to its stimulus proposal based off of concerns senators raised last week at a meeting with the president-elect's senior aides.
Reform Immigration -
March on Washington
The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.
