Shorter Fox News "All Stars": CLENIS!
While the Village Elders may be salivating over the prospect of another round of spotted dick, the real replay from the 90’s may very well be a coming recession depression:
Somewhere in all this mess the U.S. stock market will collapse. At the moment the stock market is already in a correction, worrying about an economic recession. What it really should be worrying about is something much worse – a complete collapse of the credit markets globally, leading to a depression that will last 3 – 5 years. Once that is understood, the Dow will be trading well below 8,000.
So hold on to your job, whatever that may be. Pay down your debt and watch your expenses. Monitor the credit and market risks in your investment portfolio, and if you have any real concerns, U.S. Treasuries earning 2% will be a lot better than stocks or bonds that might collapse in value. As of now, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are mowing down the big players, but the little guy will be in their sights eventually.
Rangel and Schumer are on the shows this morning talking about the need for economic demand side stimulus, though by hastening to emphasize that "no lines are being drawn in the sand," Schumer makes my next point before I get to make it: the Democratic Congress will once again give Mr. 25% whatever he wants.
I’ve talked to some progressive wonks lately who have some good ideas they are shoppping around the Hill to help with what’s coming, but while Democrats know how to govern, they truly suck at media and politics. There’s no way their fantasy league ideas will see the light of any day, because this Congress has apparently learned the wrong lesson from last year: instead of picking and sticking to fights they should fight like hell, they think their mistake last year was due to over promising and under delivering. They won’t make that mistake this year: they plan to under promise AND under deliver. The progressive policy wonks have no idea what to do about it, and no idea how to build movement around a core message. They truly don’t know what they don’t know.
And so, as Wall Street begins to fathom what it has wrought, the rest of us keep an eye on our brittle, neglected, unready economic levees. The presidential hopefuls can snipe at each other all they want, but the next president may well face circumstances unlike any in our collective memory, alien to our current discourse. Because of the price tag, ironically, it may be Wall Street that forces us out of Iraq. Welcome to the peace movement, y’all!
Not many people working today remember 1982, let alone the stagflation of the late 1970’s. . . or the depression of the 1930’s. They have no frame of reference for where we may be headed. The press may think we’re headed back to 1992, but the real worry is we may be headed for 1932, 21st Century style.
Related posts:
- Earth to CBO, Senate Finance and WaPo: “It’s the Economy, Stupid”
- Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy
- Pessimists on the Economy Don’t Exist at the Washington Post
- World Economy Finding a Bottom Because the Keynesians are in China
- FDL Book Salon Welcomes Barry Ritholtz – Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy
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Grandpa!
Hi, Pach!
Yikes!
Hey: Anybody know who’s running the book salon today?
Krugman, in his blog, says Not So Fast….
Glenn Beck said it all. We wouldn’t be in this pickle if it weren’t for FDR!
This nation is doomed.
-G
Cheery this morning, aren’t you? ;)
Geez. This is some scary stuff. What about the $800 tax rebate idea? How will this help? Will people spend it to charge the economy, or will they pay down debt?
Edwards sounds good on FTN. Says he isnt quitting.
o/t: I’m not big on newspaper endorsements and don’t think too many people are but it gives the candidate some nice quotes to use and the media mentions them. Rudy’s staking it all on Florida, as you know. He can’t be happy about this:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com…..5905.story
One of the under appreciated elements of what’s going on is the condition of the states. They have to balance their budgets, and their incomes already taking a huge hit on falling property taxes.
Big cuts coming closer to home, services, etc. Our infrastructure is already neglected for 30 years, and the states are going to need federal help before too long.
Are we gonna need another WPA?
Great post. Things are going to get really bad. I already know how to do the poor thing well:) and as long as I stay employed I’ll be fine, but folks like my sister who is/was comfortably middle class are starting to worry about pensions/investments/401 etc. I know she is getting really worried about being able to maintain/sustain her and her childrens’ standard of living (she works hard and is careful about spending etc). It’s going to be bad for so many people :(
Second that. It could get rough out there.
IANA economist, so can someone explain to me how giving a bunch of money to everyone and telling them to spend it on stuff which will most likely be imported help the US economy? Aren’t you essentially sending a bunch of money to China? At tax-payer’s expense?
Hush. You weren’t supposed to notice that… shhhh….
hey guys, on a cruise celebrating any number of things including my birthday so this is my quick comment before I get back to some hedonism;
worrying about an economic recession?
this insinuates we aren’t already in one and it insinuates we haven’t been in one for the entire length of this presiden’t bizarre “strategy” of giving middl class assets to people so wealthy they will never ever spend it
this has been a recession and it’s nothing but deliberately induced to create a class war, redistribute wealth from everyone and too those already wealthy and create a robber baron economy
back to fun and games for me. see all later
Of course, the bond play won’t work if inflation spirals up. That seem to be the more likely scenario. Just review the movement of commodity prices over the past year.
I do agree that the economy will be THE ISSUE this fall.
People are more likely to spend it on essentials, like food and housing. Once the spiral of homelessness or insolvency begins, it generates its own momentum. Food costs, reliant as they are on energy (transportation) costs, have spiked up significantly.
Again, there’s no collective frame of reference for what we’re potentially facing.
Well, Good Morning to YOU too, Pach.
I’ve had nightmares almost nightly every since junior was crowned. Thanks for enhancing my latest ones, sigh.
Thanks for the only spot of good news, snowbird42. We can hope. I can’t believe so many people want the job of
cleaningtrying tobeing expected toclean up after this gang of rethugs.It just STINKS! So much waste! So much hurt in the world….
McCain knows his way around Washington, D.C. But his maverick’s record of taking on GOP leaders and special interests shows he can be the agent of change for which many voters are clamoring.
He truly is a mold-breaker.
is that Dizzy Cruiselines? I wouldn’t touch the shrimp…
We saw this coming two years ago. We paid off our loans large and small, except the mortgate. Have paid cash for everything possible, not even using the debit card unless necessary. Been putting whatever extra cash in CD’s, and sitting tight. Boy, It’s been tough, but I think it will be the best thing for the long run.
3 6 5 – that ain’t no jive!
Actually, if people follow the advice from the Agonist, which makes a lot of sense, they will use tax refunds to pay down their debt, thus transferring tax money to the lenders that made all the dumb loans in the first place. Talk about your moral hazard. What else can we do to bail out the big money runners on Wall Street?
Certain municipal bonds might still be a safe investment, but watch for areas that are going to have a real estate bust or high foreclosures.
That is very good!
We’ve been doing that, scrabbling along, for over 40yrs. u got any better ideas? You got a year-round garden from heirloom seeds, saving snippets from yer own crops to keep it goin? You off the grid? Otherwise….
When we told people about our plans to tighten the belt and pay down debt because of the impending recession, all we got were funny looks, like we were just paranoid.
Drive the Blue Ridge Parkway (and other locations in the country)…still lots of evidence of projects from that era; they’ve been as “permanent” as anything we will see in our lifetimes.
I cringe to think what the thugs would do with/to that kind of arrangement today.
Good one Pach. I disagree on one small point. I believe Congress will give Fucktard more than 25% of what he wants.
Ohhhh! I GOT it! And no coffee even poured yet. That’s progress of a sort. Thanks for the note of “cheer”. Shall we take turns watchin’ the kid & shooter? Or did you hire that out?
Ain’t he tho’? Another dead-on call by the Sentinel.
For whatever it’s worth (and it certainly ain’t worth no delegates) the paper endorsed Hillary, too.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY Perris. tho mebbe this isn’t the thread…
You’ve already been proven a lot more smart than the idjits who gave you the “funny looks”.
Because of the R E P U B L I C A N sub-prime mortgage mess. Don’t miss a chance to wrap this tight around the Republicans free market B/S.
So I guess this is the wrong time to ask, if elected, will the Democrats put the war on the budget, or will they leave it off the budget as it has been up until now? What will happen to pay as you go? How do you add to a deficit that is already over the line?
Even in urban areas, some of the old Courthouses, etc.
What would the thugs do? They’d be all for it. Have the government build stuff and then they can privatize/sell it.
Ah that’s the beauty of it we borrow it from them.
Yes.
Don’t forget the mid-70s, when Nixon trimmed the defense budget. A lot of people got hit then – somewhere I have a copy of the resume my father wrote up, because he was unsure about his job disappearing on him (at the time he was an engineer with nearly forty years experience). I’ve heard my parents – and read a report my grandmother wrote up, when she was a county agent – on the depression years. It will be worse this time, because so many of us have no place to grow vegetables or keep chickens or rabbits or pigeons.
Friday morning CNN.com was running a poll on what people would do with this proposed $800 handout. More than half were going to apply it to bills.
The politicians may be clueless, but the rest of us know something big and bad is coming.
hAPPY B’DAY. have fun
This is from Krugman’s article. I don’t quite understand why he unquestioningly assumes that the Fed’s only purpose in lowering interest rates is to “help” an ecnomy it “thinks” is “weak”.
During his whole trickle junior’s been passing every bill down to the next generation, and the one after that. And we sometimes wonder why they’re discouraged and angry, even while they put it all on dad’s credit for the moment.
I agree with egregious. This is already getting ugly, but it’s not just “out there”. How thick do the walls have to be to protect the fat-&-happy few?!
We are going to need an FDR style New Deal to deal with what coming at us. Unfortunately, Edwards was the only one I had any confidence at all would deliver such programs.
Apparently, the vast majority of the Democratic base only listen to corporate media and never get on the internet. Clinton nor Obama will deliver the type of programs that will keep starving people off the streets. That will take too much money away from their corporate sponsors.
I’m not going to help bail out the big guys. I’m spending my rebate on weed and liquor.
-G
A luxury we can no longer afford
We spend several times what the whole rest of the world spends on what we still laughably refer to as “defense”. If defense was what we were planning for, we would have a standing military establishment capable of fighting off the dread prospect of a Mexico-Canada alliance to partition us — say 5% tops of what we spend now on our military. Yet we don’t seriously plan to use this incredibly expensive military on the offense, to conquer fresh countries, and certinly not now that Iraq shows us how well that goes.
There will be only two alternatives for dealing with this luxury that we will shortly realize that we can no longer afford.
The reasonable, hoped-for, response would be to repeat what we had always done after a war, up until the end of WWII, and essentially disband our standing forces. The aftermath of WWII has been historically atypical, and about 5% of current spending, and that percentage, or less, of current force structure, would indeed get us to the historical baseline of where you’ld expect our military to be when there isn’t an actual war to justify having more military on hand.
But another, darker, alternative presents itself. We could start making this luxury pay for itself. We would essentially start charging all those freeloader nations who supposedly benefit from the financial sacrifices we make to support the GWOT. If they don’t pay up, our Navy takes them out of global trade. See also Empire, Athenian. This solution would be especially likely to almost suggest itself if part of the oncoming crisis involves our creditor nations trying to get tough with their 800lb gorilla debtor. Yes, the US is not Argentina. It’s much, much worse. It’s got the shrill, paranoid internal politics of an Argentina, but which has not, before, been stressed by the economic difficulties of Argentina in the 90s, but it also has this huge, outsized military. If you thought the paranoid response to 9/11 was bad, wait until it’s more than a one-time pin-prick our political system is asked to respond to rationally and responsibly.
Already here.
OT_
Here’s Scott Horton of Harpers on Blackwater.
Depression?
The rest of the world’s economy is doing OK so sever recession is more likely
I think that since the US moved to a service based economy in the 90’s the rest of the world has picked up our manufacturing based. So widgets will still me made but not for the US market.
The real problem is inflation. The Bernanke fed keeps printing money, he believes that all economic problems can be solved with liquidity. But with each interest rate cut the dollar falls and imports, read oil, becomes more expensive.
Bush will not only leave us with a war but the economy in shambles. I guess the federal government will fit into that bathtub after all
The easiest way, but not necessarily the most prudent, for a nation to escape a debt crisis is to adopt a monetary policy that promotes inflation.
If you ‘own’ a home worth $250,000, with a $350,000 mortgage, an $800.00 tax rebate really isn’t the answer.
If this economy contiues to unravel as a consequence of unmanageable debt, don’t be surpised if the money spigots are turned on.
When shooter was standin’ behind junior at the presser earlier in the week, he looked different. Check it out. No swagger. No sparkle in the eye. No set chin. More like major saggyface. Definitely forgot to put on his leadership-honcho mask. Ruh roh. When the tyrant is frightened & discouraged over what the future holds…. parag*ay you say?
LOL! Thanks for the grin amid the grim. I’ll pass on the weed, but double up on the liquor.
Right On. A man who has his priorities in order!
Buy local!
-G
And I’ll be Willin’
Note: Link fixed by Mod
Moonshine’s not to my taste, so I’ll import some Woodford Reserve from Kentucky.
I wonder how the old ticker is doing?
precisely, mayfly. see my #42
Truly some excellent sippin’ Bourbon.
Isn’t that what post WW 1 Germany did?
I’m watching the history channel and it’s about the gang crimes of the 30’s.
The narrator said: In times of trouble a lot of money and big mansion made people a target.
Another commenter talked about ‘armies of poor people who resented the weaslthy’.
-G
How does the govt giving people money to buy stuff made in China help the economy?
My first home mortgage had an interest rate of 16.5%….those were the days.
As I said yesterday, the gates on their exclusive communities won’t save them when they’re left open by the guard.
I’m curious… why are people paying off debt… as opposed to carrying it? While having debts is a bummer because you need income to support them… why pay them all off aside from wasting money on paying interest?
Does this approach imply that borrowing for interest is “wrongheaded”?
Isn’t borrowing and credit part of this economy? What would happen of no one used credit?
Just asking…
yup. that crossed my mind. &/but, he knows they’ve really fouled up bigtime, as it were. home scheecuriosity was a myth, in every sense, for everyone including hissownself. there’s no joy in this for anyone…
remember how hyman roth ended up in the gawdfather?
with no defibrillator for anyone’s economy… who will dust the chandelier?
We will be told that a plate of steaming pig slop is a good meal and a tar-paper shack is a castle.
That’s what will happen.
Exhibit A: Iraq.
This is John McCain’s idea of success.
-G
My guess is that most people will either pay bills or buy groceries. Well, maybe that pair of shoes or shirt for your child to wear to school… I know the folks I work with are starting to get the creepy feeling that something really, really bad is about to happen to their finances. They don’t know what it is or why it’s coming, but they know that what used to cover the bills doesn’t any more.
As far as how any of that is supposed to “help the economy,” the whole idea is nonsense. It’s sound and fury signifying nothing except sound bites containing the phrase “help the economy” to lull people back to sleep. /rant.
dang. we’re on parallel tracks! if we could just find that switch, we could form a train and GO somewheres! heh.
Since I haven’t seen anyone mentioned the effects of Global Warming on the coming economy yet, I thought I would. Al Gore seems committed to becoming a venture capitalist for whoever wants to make big changes to make us more green or more energy independent, or both. Isn’t it possible that the opening up of this whole new industry could help to ease the blows the economy is taking?
First, kill your TV.
Then watch “Kill The Messenger”, a film about Sibel Edmonds and how she became an enemy of the State.
This Video is currently under embargo and unavailable to U.S.A. audiences.
However, you can get past the censorious government nannies by joining the bleeding edge of techwonery here. [Link removed by Mod]
I’m seeding this now. As Jim Morrison would say “come on baby light my byte fire…”
[Mod Note; While it is easy to find and illegally download copyrighted material from the internet, FDL does not condone or promote doing so. Thank you.]
yes — the rest of us could smell it coming. Since 2006, I’ve said 2008 would be the bust of this economy. The US is drowning in debt with a dollar not worth a nickel…
Thanks for the thread Pach — Grandpa’s economy is right!
Here is the another crazy-assed development under W.: We have abandoned our cheap food policy.
Every country, with any sense, since Marie Antoinette has adopted a cheap food policy.
Kicking the can down the road. It’s the only thing this feeble minded Bush and his handlers and stooges know how to do.
As for Deadeye Dick, he sees the curtain closing on his career and his life and knows that he’s going down in history as one of the great villains for our times.
Bush is too stupid to see beyond Karl Rove’s storybook narratives about him being a great man in world history.
That’s why he keeps talking about it, he believes it.
Cheney aint that dumb.
-G
Are we going to watch this election under a microscope while the county falls down around our ears even as we hear the latest on whether Obama is black enough or if Hillarys voice is grating?
Ding!
Intead of using all of the energy to paint the picture it is being expended on high school antics.
-G
Causes of the Great Depression:
TOHUODU
Tax Policies of Andrew Mellon
Overproduction of Goods
High Tariffs
Unwise Speculation in the Stock Market
Overexpansion of Credit
Drought in the Mississippi Valley
Unhealthy International Monetary Situation
You can debate how many of these conditions exist today.
It will give a short term stimulus by increasing consumer spending. But you are right it doesn’t address the fundamentals. Democrats and Republicans want to be seen as doing something going into the November elections. As for the Bush Administration, its goal is to kick the recession into the next Administration and leave the blame for it, and the responsibility for cleaning it up, there.
In other words, Bush is trying to do with the economy what he has already done with Iraq. He creates the mess and then he leaves it for others to deal with after he is gone.
TUODU
Global warming was a horserace environmental scientists were/ARE terribly worried about
way back in/EVER SINCE the 60’s.I thot it’d always been assumed it’s gonna take a substantial amount of extra green ($) to GO green. That’s one of the reasons the humungous, wanton, greedy waste of the past several yrs is so egregious.
Is it too late to start? Supposedly we do NOT have the luxury of standing around wondering. We have to try. With a busted economy, we do it with… what? China seems to hold a nice steaming pile of our debt. They also seem to have ZERO interest in investing in green tech.
ANGRY? Moi? That doesn’t come close.
I’ll drink to that!
Re: Tax rebates
This is a cynical, one time political manoeuver meant to placate the 80% while providing a small stimulus to the Stock Market.
As observed, there is no realistic expectation of long-term benefit.
“” Vestas Blades picked Colorado for its first North American wind blade manufacturing plant. This means hundreds of new jobs for Colorado. Thanks to companies like Vestas, Ascent Solar and Abengoa, thanks to world-class research institutions, the next generation of new-energy technology is being developed right here in Colorado.”
Governor Ritter’s State of the State address, 1/10/08.
Lots more under the heading “New Energy Economy.”
Along with Sander’s interesting question, I have one of my own. I can remember who said it – it was either Hillary or Edwards – that that horrible bankruptcy bill that everyone voted yes on never went into effect. Is that true? Because if the rules are the same as they were, at least here in Texas you can dump all your credit card debt in bankruptcy and still keep your homestead, which makes it a lot easier to ride out a recession/depression.
actually it depends on your channel.
mebbe just the results of the latest push-poll…
isn’t that why we’re all here? *tiny, determined smile*
I predict that some portion of the Emergency Oil Reserve will be drained in Aug-Nov as well.
Whip Inflation Now.
The Republican’s other “WIN”ning strategy.
That was supposed to be can’t – I can’t remember who said it.
Yeah, and that strategy worked really well for Gerry ford didn’t it?
Before you get too sotted, folks, go read
“Guns, Germs and Steel”
by Jared Diamond
Here’s an interesting take on the economy via C&L.
And “Collapse”.
My thinking, too. A concerted, all-out national push to develop methods and technology to address global warming seems like a natural…with a president who asks us to make sacrifices as well (”Ask not what you can do for your country…” etc.) A push akin to mobilization for WWII.
Sucked worse for the rest of us.
Here’s more cool shit.
Our economy is driven by energy (fuels) and credit… Labor is playing (unfortunately)a smaller part.
We are told that the fed plays the economy by releasing money into it… ie low interest rates means more money in the economy. But what they really do is encourage more borrowing… albeit at a lower and more affordable rate.
The fed prints money as bonds… sells them to financial institutions who break them up and market them to consumers as credit and large borrows as loans for capital improvements (hahahaha yea right). So you can see the fed is a big credit monster and if people did not borrow… if they had no debt.. the economy would completely tank.
right?
groan. i was trying to be a little more positive. you’re right.
why waste time on the “why’s”?
Jim Cramer was on the teevee yesterday (I believe with Tweety) predicting a meltdown of the stock market in the next two or three weeks, a drop of 2000 points. He believes the bond insurers are all bankrupt and when they start failing it will cause a melt down like we have never seen. Even though I personally take everything Jim Cramer says with a healthy dose of salt this I believe is straight talk out of him. He acknowledge he is the consumate bull but this is the real shit.
I read somewhere last year that 23% of our economy is based on financial services. If those fail there isn’t much of a backup. Who will have the money to buy from our “service based” economy?
Suggest you ask eCAHNomics about that guy.
eCAHN? u there anywhere?
Ni hoonan,
I’d like to take exception to your list of “Causes of the Great Depression:”
I’ve studied the situation with tariffs, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the “conventional wisdom” about tariffs is nothing but a post facto talking point created by the globalization, neo-liberal, “free trade” crowd.
The fact of the matter is that the greatest prosperity this nation has ever had has been during periods when we maintained strong protectionist tariffs in order to strengthen industry and manufacturing within our own borders. Every successful developing nation has done the same. Look at Japan after WW II and ask how they got to be the most advanced techological nation on the planet, surpassing the U.S. in electronics manufacturing by the mid-1980s. It was by a clearly rational policy of protectionism and a willingness on the part of the national leadership to have the Japanese suffer a bit early on as they perfected the JVC, Onkyo, Sony, Hitachi, Matsushita and other brands. Once these industrial giants matured, they utterly killed off the U.S. television manufacturing industry, where we maintained an idiotic predatory capitalist’s mercantilist vision of making money on mere trading, rather than on more nobly, profitably and sustainably creating our own products. It truly insane that the greatest manufacturing today in the U.S. is the manufacturing of our national debt and current account deficits.
These chickens are coming home to roost, chillen; and far too many people are still swallowing the neo-liberal kool-aid acid testicles.
Well, that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it! And I got me some MBA credits to my name to give me just enough insight to be willing to go out on this limner and cut myself off from Miltie Friedman’s trunk full ‘o lies and lunacy.
Actually, I think the message of Collapse, if we as a society choose to accept it, could lead us in a good direction.
Jim Cramer also told his audience to buy some investments in stocks in the financial industy because they were underrated.
A better way to make “this” economy healthy is job creation and rising wages. Put money in people’s pockets by work and new products and services they can use.. where their purchase does not move to offshore business. We need to localize the economy on a all levels and move away from the out source model which favored high profits, lower production cost, high energy use for transport and destroys local jobs. Globalization is good for profits, bad for the planet and ultimately bad for the citizens (though they think lower prices) are a benefit. The trouble is their wages are driven down to the level where they can barely even afford the lower priced imports if they still have a job.
Too much of our economy is moving toward work which produces nothing. We need service type jobs, but we are drowning in them. Too many fees and too few products are what this economy is about. Fees and commissions are just added on top of the whatever value a product has and they are out stripping the labor added value to produce these products. Too many middle men taking their piece of the action.
We need to completely rebuild this economy. Patches are not gonna save the patient this time.
I guess the good news is that I grew up in an extended family that never quite believed that the depression was over. So I know what to do. My grandmother and her sisters washed and reused EVERYTHING from the plastic bags the newspaper came in to milk cartons. They also saved every penny they could. Being good Germans they did not spend their savings, they left it to us profligate nieces and granddaughters!
. They have to balance their budgets, and their incomes already taking a huge hit on falling property taxes.
From Pach.
Worse. as Ian says in the piece they’re gonna lose access to municipal bond markets, because their insurers branched out to insuring CDOs. If you’ve been reading atrios on the shitpile, you’ll know those two insurers are now rated at 70% likely to go under. The commercial lending market will collapse, because banks will have to reserve more capital to self-insure their outstanding issues. The muni market will have nobody to back their securities, so will be force to pay more interest, if they can get into the markets at all, with falling revenue projections.
We’ve got to take a one time hit in real income as the increase in fuel prices makes its way through the economy, have to absorb consumers reducing spending from their loss of credit, and we have to deal with the collapse of the US lending market.
I guess the good news is that foreign companies are buying up US assets, trying to turn their dollars into something a little more stable.
Given that the current disaster has a lot of fingerprints from folks with MBAs, that might not be such a great thing to be bragging about these days.
“Pay down your debt and watch your expenses”
Stupid conventional wisdom.
NO. Take ALL the monay out of your house you can.
When you house falls below it current appraised value (and it will), walk away from it with the cash.
House prices in my area, Souther California, will only stop falling when the affordability index hits about 35%. That means 35% of wage earners can buy the average price house. Curent affordability index is about 17-19%. We’ve another 20%-30% to go on house prics.
CASH IS KING. Not Equity (which is going down quickly).
YES. Cut expenses. Don’t watch them, cut them. Cable, Phone, Electricity, Eating Out, cut, cut, cut.
And yes I remember both the ’70s, through now. I also remember my Father’s stories of the 30’s.
And if you believe that more defict spending by our government will do any good, ask yourself: why would anyone lend us the money? And, how will we pay the interest?
Insurance is a smoke and mirrors game. These guys bet that all their insured will not make a claim.. same as a run on the bank to with draw your money. None of them have it.
So Cramer is right, when these insurers are asked to pony up on a claim and there will be many of the them… they already spent the money or don’t have enough of it sitting around to pay off… what they do have was invested in the financial instruments they are insuring. hahahahaha How’s that for a rube goldberg!
Well, no MBA credits to me, I’m just a stock & trade US History teacher. The tariff in question was is the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, which effectively shut down international trade at a time when we needed European nations to purchase our goods just as desperately as they needed American dollars to repay loans taken out during WW1.
I’ll be honest, I have cribbed my notes from a variety of sources over the years, but this is one of the “papers” I refer my students to when they ask for details beyond what I offer in class.
While I am certainly no expert, I do know that the legislation that passed did go into effect, unless of course they were talking about specific egregious provisions I am unfamiliar with. To most of us common folks, it means that, although we still have the ability in case of emergency to dump our credit card debt and other debt while keeping a set amount of equity in a homestead. What’s changed is that it’s now a lot harder to do, in that we may have to repay some of that debt for a time, and we may also need to take debt management courses to “learn how to better manage” our money. My niece was a bankruptcy paralegal, and she helped me thru my own bankruptcy just prior to the rules changes so that I could avoid that crap. Most of my debt was due to having no income and no liquid assets to spare during the time I was waiting for disability to come thru.
So the answer seems to be yes, the changes we have to make due to global warming should help us through our financial crises. One bright light?
It’s like one of those old SAT analogies:
Jim Cramer is to economic analysis what Chris Matthews is to news.
We only till part of our garden at any given time. Some areas of it are going all year round. The carrots, brussels sprouts, chard, scallions, and sunchokes are particularly tasty right now, especially with the mulched herbs we’ve nestled nearby…
The birds and squirrels should have enough dried berries & crabapples, walnuts and hazelnuts to last the winter. They eat the snow for water.
We pamper them, actually ourselves mostly, with suet and extra sunflower seed, for the beauty of their fluffy charm by the window.
n.e. OH, 10 degrees F. last night…
Edward Teller? U there anywhere?
I wasn’t going to bring up the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s degree…
You’re right, to be sure. Just less entertaining. Don’t want people to get whiplash, but maybe it’s time for that…
Today’s Boston Globe business section has a column on how the path from the Corner Office to the Oval Office seems to have gotten a bit longer than it once appeared to be.
Was that where I heard that the companies that provide PMI may go bankrupt due to the sub-prime crisis?
I am quite sure it went into effect. My son was forced to declare bankruptcy after a long struggle to keep his business afloat, often putting his payroll on a personal credit card so his employees wouldn’t suffer. That, coupled with a wife who spent like a drunken sailor (mixed metaphor, sorry) put him into bankruptcy. He has a good job now, but at 42 has no savings (first kid hits college in 4 years), a divorce, and still owes family (including me) a lot of money. I’d love to forgive the debt but I can’t, with retirement looming. I can wait for the money, but eventually I will need it. And he is a fine, upstanding man, not a deadbeat.
Sorry, my #116 was meant in reply to slide at #96.
It’s interesting you say that. I thought GGS was very repetitive; I got bored after the first few chapters. I found Collapse to be more entertaining, although also a bit repetitive (yes, all societies collapse, and it’s because they fuck up their environment and run out of natural resources).
Dow at 8,000? I hope that’s way off, but at least it will put a stake in the heart of “privatizing Social Security”. That is, until the market recovers.
whatever is going on in the economy it is a feed back feed forward dynamic and unless some new input (large one at that) is present it moves in the direction it is headed. And these days it is down. It also has a tendency to accelerate whatever it’s doing because of the interconnectedness of the financial markets.
Fuel cost skyrocket, people stop buying suburbs and exburbs properties. Car sales tank, Detroit lays off and all the support industries, metal, rubber, glass… Mortgage scam revealed and that tanks the real estate values even more. Home building slows, building supplies slow, real estate biz tanks, mortgage biz tanks, big box stores start closing, tax base dwindles, schools suffer, infrastructure crumbles and so it goes.
P.S. My son declared bankruptcy just ahead of the new law by a whisker.
Excellent! I suspect eCAHN would get a kick outta that one too. *g*
Yah, it certainly seems they want to foment class war and create a robber baron economy. Problem is, they *lost* last time there was a Great Depression. FDR taxed them into extinction and created the middle class out of that. What’s to say that does’nt happen again?
But the shit and misery we get to go thru in the meantime…GRRRRRRRR!
I saw that and didnt think he was kidding…very scary
Oh, the bankruptcy bill absolutely went thru. Clinton might have been talking about another version she voted against or something, but it passed, ironically enough right when I was taking the bankruptcy class for paralegals. It’s a bad, bad bill and turns everything upside down. It basically steers everyone away from the traditional chapter 7 in which you get to protect most things and start over, into 11 (I think, or 13 — lots of chapters) where you’re forced into a huge painful repayment plan and lose most of your stuff in the process.
In my experience, a good financial advisor will always tell people to selectively buy undervalued stocks when the market is down. Hence the saying: buy low, sell high. It’s a pretty good idea if you are smart enough to choose well and have money to spare for the long term during a pretty harsh economy.
I’ve been wracking my brain about it, and I just can’t figure it out. BushCo knows that the White House fence is the only thing standing between them and various layers of the criminal justice system. If they have an exit strategy, a legal one, I don’t see it.
How do you have a garden at this time of year? Our raised beds are waiting for spring under their mulch. Hopefully the local farmer will bring cow/horse manure.
The fact that the dow can “correct” by 10s of %s shows that the underlying value of shares is totally bogus.
Just think about it… is a share really a tiny fraction of some company? Really? or some made up value like the emperor’s clothes?
When you buy a share… who do you buy it from?
Chances are from someone else who owned it and the value increase does not go to the company who issued it. But what it does is sets a new value for everyone else’s shares… including the company’s. It’s a total nonsense gambling scheme of perceived value with a little bit of real bricks and mortar valuation to create the illusion that a share is something.
If you didn’t learn that from the dot.com frenzy you missed a valuable lessen about shares. It’s a ponzi scheme and the brokers win every time there there is a transaction… fees… sell, buy, up, down, win, lose.. they make out.
Americans were told to buy shares and like idiots they did.
Instead of a Pity Party or Garden Party it will be a Pardon Party.
Pardons for Everybody! On the House (the White House that is)…
It’s a good strategy, yes. unfortunately those folks who followed his suggestions have assets that are now down at least 60%.
Kids can work to put themselves through college. This business of people going to the poor house for their kids has to end. Also, student loans so they graduate with $100,000 in debt. May take a little longer, but it can be done. I remember 18 unit semesters working 40 hours a week. Still don’t know how I did it, but youth is a wonderful thing!
Education should be free as it is in Europe. Just another way capitalism fucks you over. Higher education institutions are big bidness and making profits.
I have a little problem with this: I think it is productive to keep your house in good order by bringing in the guy to check out your air conditioning and do the regular cleaning of the ducts, etc.
I’ll finish this is just a minute. I need to say something else right now. See my next comment.
Pach has another post up for us “About That Reagan Thing.”
I remember the Depression. Dad was a country doctor, so my
family did not suffer as much as most of our neighbors. My dad saw and treated all sick people. No way was turned away. His practice was 30% charity. Other patients were good for loads of fire wood, regular milk supplies, eggs, and even the odd deer steak or two. And bear steak, but only once. Many of my school mates had no sneakers for gym, many went without dental care, some without toothbrushes. Some had meat once a week. WPA put in a new sewer, paying workers $25/week. Oil lease workers were paid $125/month plus a cabin on the lease to live in. I was a pall bearer for six classmates before I hit the eight grade. Good luck.
What Ray said –
I’ve studied the situation with tariffs, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the “conventional wisdom” about tariffs is nothing but a post facto talking point created by the globalization, neo-liberal, “free trade” crowd.
Absolutely correct — “Free Trade” is the biggest PR fraud perpetrated on America since Junior McChimpy was passed off as a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with.
There has never been Free Trade anywhere in the history of the planet — the economic trading system is always rigged to benefit someone, and in the case of Free Trade, the beneficiaries are the Wall Street Investment Banking houses. Wall Street profits by currency trading, busting unions and businesses and shipping jobs overseas, and they do it all in the name of Free Trade. What we have is a government bought sold and traded by Wall Street investors, with the system rigged to leave no Hedge Fund Manager behind.
But now that the last of the 1% Greenscam Randian economy bubbles are collapsing, the American people are waking up to a world of hurt. Real Estate, Credit, and now the Stock Market — Hedge Fund managers, start your Lear Jet engines; you’d best be getting out while the gettin’ is good.
Confession time here: I’ve been relaying my hubby’s thots to you. He’s read them both, and thought both excellent, but he’s thinking twd layman’s possible reaction to them (he’s PhD, taught -among other things- Principles of Biology for >30 yrs to bio. majors).
Both books are next-up on my “to read” list, after about 70 pp more of somethin’ entirely different. Since they both are so relevant to today’s crises, and therefore sobering on topics I’ve stewed about for my adult life thus far, I probably won’t read them back-to-back. I can only afford to be semi-sober about all this, in order to manage my own depression over the whole mess we’re in.
This administration has been one long nightmare.
Prognosis was dim enough already. It did NOT need to become THIS bad!
The waste. The greed. The callous disregard for others on this planet…
People will take the $800 or $1,600 and pay their oil bills, or mortgage, or credit cards. In other words just another transfer of public $ to big business.
The real solution is to start taking our medicine. Get out of Iraq. Eliminate corporate welfare. Progressive taxation. Start investing in our infrastructure (with union jobs). Invest in technologies that are designed to achive energy independence and protect the enviroment. And, universal, single-payer health care.
I also happen to think that it is productive to hire the services of a professional realtor in most cases; I’ve done so myself even when I had a license, but was on inactive status. I was in a two wage earner family and I couldn’t spare the time to do the homework necessary. The mechanic that fixes your car provides a necessary service within the great scheme of things. But in the long run, again I see the global warming situation being both a curse (destructive weather conditions) and a blessing (jobs, jobs, jobs!)
These types of jobs are fine and are hardly differnt from producing the product itself. They are like garage mechanics who take take of cars for example.
I am referring to the fee sucking jobs like real estate brokers… “agents” of every stripe… “consultants”.. referral services… and all the middle men who pass a product along and raise up the price.
Re:
As a true conservative, I reject such apocalyptic visions. While some of my polka-playin’ Polski cousins are accordionists, I’m strictly an anti-armageddonist.
What we need is a gentle flight path of evolutionary transition to a true social democracy in the traditions of the Scandahoovians, Canunks and the much missed Social Fabians.
JMVHO and, of course, YMMV
I agree with oldgold, that there will be massive inflation, it’s the only way out in the end for the US Gov’t. Fortunately, somehow, they agreed to have their foreign debt denominated in dollars, when these dollars are worth 10 cents, they will basically not have to pay back that debt.
It continues to be clear that the US inflation rate is dramatically understated. My biggest expenses are college tuition, housing, medical insurance — these have all gone up dramatically fast than the CPI.
You nailed it… just another transfer of money to corporations. Innersting that eh?
Re:
Kind sir, it was no brag. It was merely an assertion of my bona fides to spout off.
The best day ever at MBA skuhl for me? Was the day we went down to the San Francisco office of the Federal Reserve Bank on tour. It was absolutely fascinating, and if you ever get the chance I highly recommend it. We got to see the machinery used for clearly ungodly numbers of checks at breakneck speed on utterly sophisticated tabulation machinery. But the most impressive thing for me was walking down a long, long corridor in the basement of the Bank and staring through a tall bullet-proof series of windows at ~$3 Billion in Federal Reserve Notes. It was a huge pile. Massive.
And it reminded me that in America, it’s the Benjamins that matter!
Right on.. this unfettered free market capitalism is screwing the people big time.
They got congress to stop regulating corporations and whenever they do these corporations get into trouble and screw people in the process.
If corporations are not checked we will go down the drain for sure.
And as I said, given the work of MBAs in formulating this disaster, stating them as your “bona fides” may not accrue all that much to your benefit.
Guilt by association, I think they call it.
It will help a little in the immediate short term but will not fix all that much beyond that.
How much help the rebate can generate depends on who gets it. For optimal effectiveness, it is the people with the highest propensity to consume and the lowest propensity to save who should qualify and they are in the lowest economic strata.
Rebates, however, only benefit those in employment. It really should have been rebates and increases in welfare payments to those without employment – increases in food stamps alone is not a good substitute for the latter.
For the longer term, there needs to be more regulation of the finance industry, particularly for outfits that have been operating as banks outside the regulatory environment of banking. Such policies, however, relate to averting a similar crisis in the future. They will not defuse the crisis that is already upon us all.
In the medium term, China and the Arab oil producing countries selling oil for the US$, will bail out the big guys by buying big share/stock/ownership portfolios because they cannot afford to liquidate their US$ reserves.
The net result a few years down the track is that the US will no longer own the bulk of global financial capital. Wall Street will still be trading in financial capital on a global scale that the USA does not own as much of. For many ordinary people in the USA, times are going to be hard.
A new era is in the offing. US will have to realign its foreign policy to a new geopolitical-economic reality. This is already happening. Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable for Saudis to refuse politely but point blank POTUS’ plea to up oil production. The Saudi king expresses concern about the impact that high oil prices can exert on global, not US, economic growth. He knows perfectly well that demand is not going to slacken because there are others lined up to take up the slack from a depressed US economic sector.
Amen, brother. Why aren’t more people talking about Iraq’s effect on the economy? The stimulus “plans” are band aids — what we need is to sew up the sucking chest wound that is W’s misbegotten war. The government will have no money to do the fine things you suggest, jloc, unless we get out of Iraq. John McCain wants to stay there for the next 100 years. Will someone (a Democratic candidate, for instance) please start making this connection? Every promise John McCain makes is bankrupt because if we stay in Iraq, the money won’t be there to do squat. Why is it okay to flush a trillion dollars away blowing up the Middle East(and for what?) but it’s a mortal sin to spend a dime helping Americans who’ve been battered by Bush’s Katrina-like handling of the economy?
It’s about coin-clipping. Back when coins were made of precious metal people would take a little bit off the circumference. Not enough to make a difference in exchange, but over time you collected a little pile of shavings. Of course that defeats the whole idea of currency.
Today we’ve got bunches of people who aren’t working but have what are called good jobs, i.e., making good money essentially for showing up and being well-spoken at business meetings. That’s coin-clipping. When these people’s dollars are traded, somebody else is carrying the load. Really, that’s what the subprime crisis is all about.
Eventually we may all have to lose our jobs before we figure out who’s producing value and who is just gaming the system. These shakeouts are necessary from time to time; otherwise there’s more fleas than dog.
I’m not sure what you mean by “apocalyptic visions”. The basic idea–which should be uncontroversial even to a “true conservative”–is that when societies use up all the shit they need to sustain their populations, those populations decline catastrophically. Don’t “true conservatives” believe in the laws of physics?
The bond play that’s the exception would be TIPS. I’m in precious metals and gold which held up pretty well until last week. The official inflation figure is obviously being downplayed…look at gold prices and the cost of groceries.
Hi egregious, I don’t think munis are safe. Look at the troubles the bond insurers are having.
If you re-read the list of veggies: it becomes fairly clear our garden’s pretty dormant at this time of year. We mulch and tuck things in pretty well in the fall. The snow helps provide a nice blanket. Many years, I’ve used old tarps and plastic, weighted down with bricks. One year I even used milk-jugs & clear plastic drink bottles filled with water, tucked up near the plants under the plastic. That silly trick was surprisingly successful.
The 1st time I tried and was successful in keeping chard going all winter, I wondered at my stupidity in ignoring it for so many years previous. [hint: green chard stands cold temps better than rhubarb chard] Yum!
Even when the ribs are a bit hollow, go ahead and use the green part of the leaf – terrific “chiffonaded” (eat yer heart out Martha) in salads, or chopped in soup, or munched as is. Don’t pick the whole plant; just snip off what you want, and tuck the cover back loosely over the rest of the plant.
Another terrific green: bok choy. It NEVER gets bitter or stringy. It will make it thru winter easier than chard, but also needs mulch & cover.
Ditto, green onions. For starters: grab a bunch of those matured pearl onions at holiday time & stick ‘em in the ground instead of in the Thanksgiving dinner. You’ll probably have little bits of green onion all winter if you just trim the green part, but leave the growing bulb in the ground to sprout more. If your choy goes to seed in the summer heat, don’t fret. Just keep a sharp eye out for choy babies next season. They pop up quickly and grow wonderfully.
Radishes, turnips, cabbage are other good ones to keep in mind.
I dig carrots all winter, just as I need them. The ground doesn’t freeze because of the mulch.
Altho I don’t technically use the “raised bed” method of planting, I do always rake the planting beds so run-off and irrigating are pretty tightly controlled, and I tend to use bed-style planting rather than rows; also, I never walk on the planted areas. That way, even though our soil is pretty heavy clay (in spite of decades of adding goodies to the soil), it stays loamy and pliable and soft for continuous harvesting &/or tucking new starters in. I mark the margins of planting beds with little stakes, so they’re easily found even in mid winter. It’s chaotic to look at, but it works for us.
EPU’d for sure, and surely not what Cramer has in mind. He’d rather we panic. Some head for the bottle. Some eat the weeds.
((((PEACE)))) ;->
;->
I had been fretting about these credit derivatives from 2004 on and telling anybody who would listen to pay off their debts, including mortgages. Common sense should have alerted many more people. You simply cannot sell and resell financial risks ad infinitum. They are risks! The asset backing they are based on becomes too minimal as transactions multiply. What amazes me is that so few European and East Asian central banks questioned the ratings handed down by the US based investment brokers. That is going to change from now on with many of these countries’ banks and institutions which bought into these nonexistent assets already threatening to sue the brokers and the investment houses for bad faith. US Government assurances and strongarm tactics are not going to work in the future.
Go take a look at Mt. Rainier.
Staying out of debt helps sleep better at night in crises like this.
They truly don’t know what they don’t know.
Dem leadership, a la Rumsfeld: known gnomes, un-gnome knowns…
If there is a Depression, at least while we’re in the soup lines we can all take comfort that the Republics have fought so hard to keep gay marriage illegal.
Adie, we haven’t met. Good to meet you. It just occurred to me it would be truly useful now to learn how to grow food. I also have an idea for a topic in the Saturday “Pull Up a Chair” forum, for sharing information that we as a community can benefit from during the economic downturn. Barter whether of goods or information when money is scarce is another good idea I think.
As a student of archetypal influences on cultural history, one of the themes – which we are already seeing is a collapse of structures (2007-2012 I believe), all kinds from bridge and infrastructure collapses, to economic (the current sub prime) housing market collapse, to the financial markets to political/governmental collapses.
One of the themes also we’ve seen on a wide scale is disillusionment with government (which will still be operative in the 2008 presidential election and which accounts at least in part for Obama’s appeal). I’m wondering whether a creative response to this state of affairs is up to us, the citizenry, at the local and community level, to work together toward solutions we want, instead of relying on so called leaders at the federal level to take care of things. This way of doing things it seems to me has failed.
PeteCO – love what’s happening in Colorado. Thanks for the links.
“Kind sir, it was no brag. It was merely an assertion of my bona fides to spout off.” RayD
C’mon Ray, really? You’re funny. *g*
I do not remember Jim Cramer suggesting any stock purchases but he did say there could be a floor on the fallout when the big companies dividend rate exeeded the 10 year note rate. But, that is a red herring because just like Citi did the other day they will cut their dividend.
As long as we’re
mis-usingbroadening the definitions of “evolution” and “conservative” here, is it o.k. to refer to “MBA” as Misguided But Assertive?sorry Ray. too too tempting.
Hi Peony. Nice to meet you.
I know my run-on garden-talk here seemed weirdly out-of-place, but it was in response to someone’s question upthread.
Yes. You have some dandy ideas for a post. Christy’s done some good ones which might bear revisiting also while choosing topics.
I was a stay-at-home mom, using the masters degree (biology, Ray, published) to become a pretend subsistence farmer of sorts. Hard to tell how much money we saved but, now that the kids have grown and fledged into their own careers, the whole family enjoys sharing fond memories of the experience. And we still can’t do without that home-grown stuff so the garden, albeit much much smaller now, persists. ;->
Adie, it was your “run-on garden-talk” that made me realize you know something really useful, which is something I could use, knowing how to grow food. Not that I am one, but being, say, a stockbroker on Wall Street may not be much use soon. Congrats on the farming experiment, sounds like that experience enriched your life and that of your family.
Yes, Christy’s had some great Saturday morning threads.
Pre Great Depression there wasn’t a politician who would’ve done what FDR did. Even afterward the Republicans preach small government very well and often. But, name for me even one, just one, politician these days who would dare face down a recession or even a flat economy without rushing to the microphone to announce that the government was going to intervene to help business? True Liberalism is gone. The Great Depression woke us up.
What stands now is a governmental system which has very weak methods to handle economic problems. changing interest rates isn’t going to solve most modern recessions.
I don’t recommend any reforms. I haven’t given this issue a lot of thought.
Can you imagine a society which produces everything we need so efficiently and cheaply that only a very small minority of us are needed to work? How would resources be allocated in that kind of Society? Would our current liberalized-free-market capitalism manage it?
Change comes to you. You don’t have to seek it. The question is how you handle it. How do you govern without trying to dominate, own and control the world?
Republicans seem afraid of the world and they seek to dominate it. Democrats are of many kinds.
Hillary wants to manage government and ‘hit the ground running’, but doesn’t really offer a vision of where we’re going and what we’re aiming for. Obama offers unity with Republicans. I’d like something a little more related to how people are supposed to live in this changing world.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, I don’t think they’re worried about the pending problems. I think they’re worried their timing of it will fall on their watch and not the next president’s (presumably a Dem).
Remember, these dolts only think of themselves.
You betcha. That’s why John Edwards includes that in his plans.
Got Leadership?
It’s part of the “small government to drown in bathtub” Republican policy which is aimed at preventing a Dem president from doing anything which costs money.
Strangely enough, it might force government to do some positive things just to keep us afloat.
Nora Jones has a song “Everybody hold your breath cause we’re gonna be sinkin’ soon. … in this cheap pontoon.” which sorta describes our situation.
Consider this: you have an economy which we can pretend is a big stack of blocks, tall like a skyscraper.
Someone says we can do better with cheap labor from abroad. So, they take the top blocks off the stack and move them to other countries. They make more profit as expected and tell everybody the economy is doing great. Nobody suspects anything is wrong because “they wouldn’t lie to us”.
Next, they take a few more blocks off the top. There were going to be some new ones added, but those too get sent overseas. The tower gets shorter and yet they say the economy is great. People start to notice the tower is shorter.
At some point the people are expected to make do with the income from the shorter tower and still buy all the goods now being made overseas — the prices haven’t come down sufficiently because the companies want the profits. It becomes harder to buy stuff.
The economy slows a bit and a few prices are reduced. Happy faces all around.
At some point in this process it becomes harder to keep the economy going because the short tower just doesn’t produce enough incomes for American workers, despite fairly cheap prices on the goods now being imported. The economy suffers first where it’s weakest — credit financial markets (which are very sensitive).
When the tower crumbles America suffers mightily and has to rebuild. But, for many Americans the tower has been crumbling block by block for many many years. It’s just the Rich who haven’t really cared because they’ve been profiting from new towers being built overseas. They’ve become foreigners in a sense.
We must regain control of our economy and complete trade restriction isn’t the answer, but some kind of protectionism is inevitable.
It’s been said, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”
These days they say the only purpose for a corporation is to make money. And, it’s killing us.
Apparently we need for corporations to do something else or we need to kill them before they kill us. I’d prefer to find some way to evolve into a better Society. I’m squeamish about cash flowing in the streets.
Because the Republicans want (to steal a lot of money and) to win the political game here in America forever. They don’t want Democrats to have any success at all. And, their strategy is to nearly bankrupt us, so Dems won’t have any money to ‘play’ with.
Ideas do matter.
More Americans are becoming savvy about the economy. As far as the election and who knows best about what is good for America. It’s a fair conclusion the Clintons not only know what is good but will educated the electorate about what is a challenge in the economy for the future. This is exactly what the Republicans are afraid of. The economics are simple, cut taxes enough and the general public services can get deteriorated to the point of difficult return, or collapse realized were money can not save the system immediately. Cutting taxes enough times results in a choked economy, simple straight forward. Handing off this type of economic disaster is precisely what the Republicans wanted to do, but the timing fell off the mark.
Greed, power, and profiteering are so prolific and permeate the very fiber of the Republican Party, absolutely influenced and consulted by the Saudi-Bush business partnerships, and well connected to corporate America today. Its attraction is manifest in the over whelming complicity to bias, deceit, cover-ups, Intelligence manipulations, And most of all on a daily basis Journalist fraud, through, snit, snide, smear, with occasional dignity spread thick to make it seem ok, across the public electromagnetic spectrum.
Where all channel mediums are filled with hatred bias, and long hard relations to immediate changers like Lieberman, and Obama. Here America is witness to extremes at both ends in new and old timers. Lieberman, changes from the Democratic label to support a Republican candidate McCain. Actually, many now think Lieberman was and is a Republican all along and finally came out of the closet. Obama is even more spectacular, now, supporting the Reagan platform which included wild deficits, overspending, and an incredible secret war that Reagan essentially supported Osama Bin Laden. If you ever get chance to read Obama’s book called “Audacity of Hope”, Obama make a momentous statement were “Obama offers no unifying theory of American Government”. A very idiotic statement to say by someone who taught the Constitution and law at the University of Chicago for eight to ten years.
A statement that supports Charles Rangel, when Rangel called Obama stupid about his argument referenced to Martin Luther King, were King needed no help to make the civil right movement practical, meaning it was not necessary to sign into law by President Johnson at the time. Here, we know America is based on laws of the Republic. Yet, whispers of the Anti-Constitutional reasoning is pronounced here by Obama in his book, with a periodic notion that he Obama does not know how to change government, but carries a banner in his campaign “Change you can believe in”. The worry is by both sides, Republican and Democrat is that the seed of Islam buried deep in Obama is now surfacing even though Obama rants that he is a Christian, hard to believe by not completing his conversion to take the leap to a Christian name. It’s as though Obama is on the fence and playing both sides. Who knows Obama may surprise everyone and run on a Republican ticket? The best of all cut and run candidates; here America knows the Republicans have trashed the Constitution ever since they have been in power. They love the Saudi money. As George says “Money Trumps Everything”.