Tag: economy

Trump Offers Huge Favors to Billionaires, and Calls It a Big Economic Speech

GOP presidential pick’s policy paves way for Wall Street looting of economy.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Adele M. Stan

Emphasis Mine

If it came out of the mouth of any other politician, the speech delivered Monday by the Republican presidential candidate at the Detroit Economic Club would have been stunning in its mendacity. But issuing forth from the pie-hole of Donald J. Trump, it was, sadly, to be expected.

The lies were almost too many to count: Point to a sentence, find a lie. There was the lie about his opponent’s policy on taxing the middle class; Hillary Clinton clearly said she wouldn’t, and Trump is using her dropping of a consonant on a single word to say she did. (Just to be sure, PolitiFact had academics run audio of Clinton’s tax statement through a machine that analyzes such things.)

He claimed “the terrible Obama-Clinton judgment” destroyed Detroit’s manufacturing sector, when the Obama administration twisted Republican arms to get the funding to save the American auto industry. 

There were also lies of omission. The U.S., he said, has the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world, without mentioning the fact that many of the nation’s largest corporations pay no taxes at all. In fact, some, such as Verizon and General Electric, actually pay a negative tax rate, meaning they actually get rebates back from the Treasury.

I could go on and on, but “Trump lies” is pretty much a dog-bites-human story. Yawn.

More telling is who Trump named to his economic team—the very sort of people who stand to gain from his Main Street-looting economic policies. For starters, they are 13 rich white men. But they’re rich white men whose riches were mostly gained by preying on the weak. And most, Politico’s Shane Goldmacher reports, are major donors to the Trump campaign.

Take John Paulson, whose Paulson & Co. hedge fund, according to Forbes, “is famed for betting against subprime mortgages at the peak of the 2007 credit bubble.” Paulson, the magazine reports, is worth $9.8 billion.

Then here’s Harold Hamm, founder of the oil firm Continental Resources, who is known to frequent the big donor confabs convened by the Koch brothers (but who is now at odds with the scions of Koch Industries over the brothers’ refusal to back Trump). Hamm is a backer of the climate-science deniers in Congress, according to the Energy and Policy Institute, and is said to be shaping Trump’s energy policy. If you don’t see climate-science deniers as preying on the weak, think about the people who got hurt in Hurricane Katrina. Think about the people who can’t sell their homes in Norfolk, Virginia because of sea-level rise.

And let’s not forget Steve Feinberg, the CEO of something called Ceberus Capital Management, which Evan Popp and Josh Israel of Think Progress describe as “a private investment firm which specializes in ‘distressed investing.’” Among the “distressed” properties acquired by Ceberus is Remington, the manufacturer of the AR-15-style rifle—the kind that was used in the Sandy Hook massacre and other mass shootings.

My personal favorite among the men at Trump’s economic table is probably the least wealthy but perhaps the most disingenuous: Stephen Moore, former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and late of the Heritage Foundation. Known for his insanely inaccurate economic predictions, Moore has been the toady of billionaires for decades, allowing him to fall ever-upward.

In 2011, while reporting for AlterNet and the Investigative Fund on the Koch brothers’ fomenting of the Tea Party movement, I found Moore wrapped up in a for-profit scheme apparently designed to scare the employees of companies hired by him into voting for Republicans. The scheme was called Prosperity 101 and was helmed by Mark Bloch, then the state chairman of the Wisconsin chapter of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity political astroturf group. Moore was often a paid speaker at the ostensibly voluntary seminars employees at firms in the Koch network were invited to attend. He was also often a paid speaker at Americans for Prosperity events, even as he sat on the editorial board of one of the nation’s major newspapers.

Moore’s contribution to the seminar textbook was illustrative of his willingness to simply make stuff up. From AlterNet’s 2011 report:

In “The Keys to Prosperity,” Moore’s chapter in the Prosperity 101 textbook, he offers up a series of charts, some of them indecipherable, including a pie chart called “Where Your Federal Tax Dollar Goes.” (Apparently derived from an earlier presentation Moore made at an AFP Foundation event, the same charts can be found here; scroll to slide no. 16 for this one.) Citing such official sources as the Internal Revenue Service, the Government Accountability Office and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it features eight slices labeled “Flushed Down a Toilet, “Pissed Away,” “Down a Rat Hole,” “Sleaze,” “Corruption,” “Given to ‘Supporters,'” “Tossed Down the Drain,” and “Postage Stamps.” (The latter, Moore baselessly contends, accounts for 6 percent of your tax dollars—which is, incidentally, six times the allotment for non-military foreign aid). 

In psychology, there’s a concept known as projection, the term for when a patient ascribes to his nemesis the very motive or behavior that animates the patient. 

In his nearly hour-long speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump accused his opponent of being “bought, controlled and paid for by her donors and special interests.” 

Look at the men on Trump’s own economic team, and you’ll get a very clear idea of just who his policies aim to benefit.

 Adele M. Stan is AlterNet’s senior Washington editor. Follow her on Twitter @addiestan.

See:http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/election-2016-0?akid=14516.123424.kDqD-C&rd=1&src=newsletter1061540&t=2

Kasich’s ‘Ohio Story’ Not a National Model, Commerce Report Shows

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Source: Plunderbund

Author:

Emphasis Mine

Ohio Gov. John Kasich is out testing the presidential waters for 2016. While the governor may want people to believe he can walk on water, a report from the U.S. Department of Commerce shows he better take his water-wings with him because he might find himself treading water at best and submerged at worst, in light of earning reports on how the state stakes up to other states and the national average.

Ohio remains 37th in the national in job creation, as determined by the well-respected W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, and has consistently failed to break even with national job creation for 27 straight months. But when it comes to personal income in Ohio for 2014, it finally matches the nation at 3.9 percent. Ohio’s annual personal income on a per capita basis was $42,571, ranking the state in the bottom half of states at 29th. Per capita personal income in the United States was $46,129. The report ranked Connecticut first at $62,467 and Mississippi last at $34,333.

Forty-five states including Ohio experienced personal income growth in 2014 over 2013. That growth ranged from 0.5 percent in Nebraska to 5.7 percent in Alaska and Oregon. The report defined personal income including wages and other earnings from investments or Social Security payments, among other criteria. Again below the national average, net earnings grew by 3.5 in Ohio between 2013 and 2014 while during the same period 4 percent was the national average. And since inflation was way low at 1.3 percent in 2014, personal income growth in Ohio and other states exceeded that figure.

It’s no secret that workers’ wages have stagnated for decades, and net earnings in 2014 even though up don’t yet prove wages are growing again. In Ohio, the report said, personal income and net earnings growth are only slight better than over the past few years. Net earnings in Ohio grew by 3.6 percent in 2012 but slumped to only 1.6 percent in 2013, not a good benchmark to point to for Ohio’s governor who thinks his work in Ohio is a good model for the nation. Analysis of the report shows the health care and social assistance segment contributed the most to personal income growth in Ohio in 2014, while construction ranked second with manufacturing of durable goods in third place. Nationally, the report notes, professional, scientific and technical services were the largest contributing sectors.

Unfortunately for the Kasich Administration, Ohio experienced a decline in earnings in theses key sectors: farming, information, military and state and local government. In the U.S., by contrast, farming and military segments were the only areas to see earning declines. When Great Lake states were compared to each other, Ohio did perform better than its regional neighbors, which were pegged at 3.2 percent compared to 3.9 in the Buckeye State.

See: http://www.plunderbund.com/2015/04/13/kasichs-ohio-story-not-a-national-model-commerce-report-shows/

Leonard Pitts Jr.: If GOP is so right, why are red states so far behind?

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Source: McClatchy

Author: Leonard Pitts Jr.

Emphasis Mine

I have a question for my Republican friends.

Yes, that sounds like the setup for a smackdown, but though the question is pointed, it is also in earnest. I’d seriously like to know:

If Republican fiscal policies really are the key to prosperity, if the GOP formula of low taxes and little regulation really does unleash economic growth, then why has the country fared better under Democratic presidents than Republican ones and why are red states the poorest states in the country?

You may recall that Bill Clinton touched on this at the 2012 Democratic Convention. He claimed that, of all the private sector jobs created since 1961, 24 million had come under Republican presidents and a whopping 42 million under Democrats. After Clinton said that, I waited for PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking organization, to knock down what I assumed was an obvious exaggeration.

But PolitiFact rated the statement true. Moreover, it rated as “mostly true” a recent claim by Occupy Democrats, a left-wing advocacy group, that nine of the 10 poorest states are red ones. The same group earned the same rating for a claim that 97 of the 100 poorest counties are in red states. And then there’s a recent study by Princeton economists Alan Binder and Mark Watson that finds the economy has grown faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones. Under the likes of Nixon, Reagan and Bush they say we averaged an annual growth rate of 2.54 percent. Under the likes of Kennedy, Clinton and Obama? 4.35 percent.

Yours truly is no expert in economics, so you won’t read any grand theories here as to why all this is. You also won’t read any endorsement of Democratic economic policy.

Instead, let me point out a few things in the interest of fairness.

The first is that people who actually are economic experts say the ability of any given president to affect the economy – for good or for ill – tends to be vastly overstated. Even Binder and Watson caution that the data in their study do not support the idea that Democratic policies are responsible for the greater economic performance under Democratic presidents.

It is also worth noting that PolitiFact’s endorsements of Occupy Democrats’ claims come with multiple caveats. In evaluating the statement about 97 of the 100 poorest counties being red, for instance, PolitiFact reminds us that red states tend to have more rural counties and rural counties tend to have lower costs of living. It also points out that a modest income in rural Texas may actually give you greater spending power than the same income in Detroit. So comparisons can be misleading.

Duly noted. But the starkness and sheer preponderance of the numbers are hard to ignore. As of 2010, according to the Census Bureau, Connecticut, which has not awarded its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, had a per capita income of $56,000, best in the country, while Mississippi, which hasn’t gone Democrat since 1976, came in at under $32,000 – worst in the country. At the very least, stats like these should call into question GOP claims of superior economic policy.

Yet, every election season the party nevertheless makes those claims. It will surely do so again this fall. So it seems fair to ask: Where are the numbers that support the assertion? Why is Texas only middling in terms of per capita income? Why is Mississippi not a roaring engine of economic growth? How are liberal Connecticut and Massachusetts doing so well?

It seems to suggest Republican claims are, at best, overblown. If that’s not the case, I’d appreciate it if some Republican would explain why. Otherwise, I have another earnest, but pointed question for my Democratic friends:

How in the world do they get away with this?

NOTE: In a recent column, I pegged the indictment of Texas Gov. Rick Perry to his “Democratic opponents.” Though the indictment did come out of Austin, which is a blue island in the red sea that is Texas, I should have noted that the judge who assigned a special prosecutor in the case is a Republican appointee and the prosecutor he chose has, according to PolitiFact, ties to both parties.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 3511 N.W. 91 Avenue, Doral, Fla. 33172. Readers may write to him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

See:http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/09/03/238428_leonard-pitts-jr-if-gop-is-so.html?rh=1

4 Calamities destroying America’s economy that are being ignored by elites

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Source: AlterNet

Author:Frithjof Bergmann

 Emphasis Mine
The world’s current economic and political structures are proving incapable of fixing the global crisis of poverty, unemployment, and dislocation from a viable way of life for the majority of the world’s population. Why? Let us begin with one present-day example: Larry Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and also former chair of the Board of Economic Advisors, recently was the principal guest of the national radio broadcast “On Point.” The topic of the hour-long dialogue was growing “inequality.”
Summers posited that we are in an oddly slow recovery. He gave some reasons for the slowness but maintained that the measures instigated by the government (the Federal Reserve pumping funds into the economy, and the like) were fundamentally correct, and that with patience and persistence the recovery would solve the problems we have.
This basically is the position of Obama and importantly, by no means only his. Every government in every country subscribes essentially to this same apostolic faith.  That faith is pathetic and even grotesquely mistaken. It ignores the four “Tsunami” causes for the globally increasing inequality:
1. Automation: The number of jobs that have been automated out of existence in the last 30 years is astronomical. Any effort to enumerate them would be silly. Useful, on the contrary, are perhaps a few hints of the kinds of automation that are still in the future, but nonetheless just around the corner. Observe what is happening in retail –  Amazon.com, and more generally in the service sector, in banks and offices; but beyond that consider the near future of robotics, and close to that the potential of self-driving cars, and of course the galloping field of fabricators. Automation so far has only been the first breeze of an approaching hurricane.

2. A second colossal cause is globalization. Despite the nonstop discussion of that topic its basic significance is still largely misunderstood. That factory work is outsourced to lower wage countries is a belittling phrase; more accurate is the contrast between the former monopoly of a very few colonial powers and the now prevailing condition where all countries everywhere — even the Central African Republic and Borneo and Mongolia — are in development.  In other words, in all countries people are looking for jobs. Thus the supply of labor has burst through all bounds! This in turn means that the value of unskilled work has plummeted beyond human sustainability much less economic growth.
3.  Environmental degradation is growing. The depletion of natural resources is directly caused by fruitless efforts to stem unemployment.  Unemployment threatens to grow continuously and the only response we have so far marshaled is economic growth, which self-evidently is coupled to the depletion of our resources.
4. The fourth mega-force that escalates inequality everywhere is the industrialization of farming. Throughout the millennia of the Agricultural epoch approximately 75% of the population lived and worked on farms. That percentage only started to gallop away from this ratio when farming became mechanized. However, in the brief period of less than 200 years a breathtaking transformation has taken place. Worldwide 70% of farmers have been driven from their work and their land.  In country after country the percentage of people still working and living on farms has thundered downwards so that it is now in some countries only about 4%. On some continents that human migration is still in its headlong tilt: but as villages die, the former farmers do not find work;theyare absorbed in slums and sink down in the morass of extreme poverty, violence, crime, prostitution and drugs.

The really foul and grotesque dimension of this lies in its cognitive segregation, for the worldwide migration away from the farms is hardly mentioned when the deficit of jobs and the rise of inequality are discussed. In sheer numbers, this is obviously the most gargantuan cause.
It is stunning that there are whole shelves of books about the job-problem, but the reality of the loss of working on farms has rarely been included in the workforce calculations. In essence it means that 75% of the total working population have been cut off from their work and that the need to find re-employment for that huge number is part of the monster-problem that we are failing to even identify let alone solve.
If one adds these four Tsunamis together —automation, globalization, destruction of natural resources and the industrialization of farming — then it becomes obvious that the remedies now applied — stimulation of the economy, raising the minimum wage, more education and the rest — are laughably inadequate. It also becomes evident that we are emphatically not in a recovery, somnambulant or otherwise.
None of these causes are “circular,” or as it is sometimes expressed cyclical, which recoveries by definition are. All four are linear: automation, globalization, destruction of the environment and the migration away from the land will grow, far beyond where they are now, and will multiply. The inequality will become even more monstrous and more dangerous than it is now. The contrast between slums and the palaces of the superrich is already surreal and fantastic, but it will grow further and beyond our worst imaginings. The faith that we are in a circular turning wheel situation, and that automatically, obedient to the laws of economics, we move towards equilibrium, is totally unfounded.  It is just a misguided medieval superstition.

We are not turning in a circle; on the contrary we are undergoing a gigantic linear transformation that is as all changing as the shift from agriculture to industrialization.
*   *  *
Why is this a gigantic linear transformation? Because there is no circling back to a former “better” time.  The mega-factors listed have produced an enormous rift or a bifurcation. It is a split between the 20%, Oasis people (the rich) and the 80%, Desert people (the poor.)  Other groups have of course a greater liking for describing the division as between 1% and 99% but that seems too exaggerated.
New Work New Culture is a new way of looking at and actualizing how people can live in peace and prosperity, working together to provide what is needed not just for survival but for joyous fulfillment.  People of good will must stop looking back, yearning for the good old days.
New Work New Culture gives us a roadmap to take on the task to articulate a ladder that defines a practical, performable sequence of steps in detail that is realistic and manageable. By doing so we will not just alleviate the four Tsunami Calamities but give life to a rise, an ascent that has become possible with the technology that we now have.
 (Frithjof Bergmann is a retired Professor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan.  He has been writing, teaching and organizing for the ideas of New Work for more than 3 decades.  He has authored many works, including On Being Free (1977).  He is a principal organizer of the New Work New Culture conference in Detroit, Michigan from October 18-20. #NWNC2014)

Paul Ryan’s Budget

Otherwise, Congress would not ignore the consensus of scientists and economists.

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Source: AlterNet

Author: Janet Allon

Paul Krugman was in feisty form in his Friday column for the New York Times. He opened by repeating a joke from  Ezra Klein, who now is editor in chief of Vox.com. Klein once described Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, as “a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.” The same could be said, Krugman says, of Paul Ryan, chair of the House Budget Committee.

You can’t blame Krugman for being a tad bitter. He explains:

I’ve been looking  at surveys from the Initiative on Global Markets, based at the University of Chicago. For two years, the initiative has been regularly polling a panel of leading economists, representing a wide spectrum of schools and political leanings, on questions that range from the economics of college athletes to the effectiveness of trade sanctions. It usually turns out that there is much less professional controversy about an issue than the cacophony in the news media might have led you to expect.

This was certainly true of the most recent

poll, which asked whether the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — the Obama “stimulus” — reduced unemployment. All but one of those who responded said that it did, a vote of 36 to 1. A follow-up question on whether the stimulus was worth it produced a slightly weaker but still overwhelming 25 to 2 consensus.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether the panel is right in this case (although it is). Let me ask, instead, whether you knew that the pro-stimulus consensus among experts was this strong, or whether you even knew that such a consensus existed.

The answer is most likely, no, unless you are someone who goes very far out of your way to get honest information like that. Krugman reports that on CNBC, the host was “so astonished to hear yours truly arguing for higher spending to boost the economy that  he described me as a ‘unicorn,’ someone he could hardly believe existed.”

Just as Republicans in Congress ignore climate scientists, they also ignore economics professionals when it comes to government spending. Economics may not be the hard science that climate science is, but still, it is reminiscent of the whole war on knowledge/war on intelligence/war on science trope.

No, the Republican ideologues prefer to put their faith (which is the right word, since they pursue their ideology with religious zeal) in discredited doctrines.

Krugman, ever fair-minded, does point out the exception to the rule:

The odd man out — literally — in that poll on stimulus was Professor Alberto Alesina of Harvard. He has claimed that cuts in government spending are actually expansionary, but relatively few economists agree, pointing to  work at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere that seems to refute his claims. Nonetheless, back when European leaders were making their decisive and disastrous turn toward austerity, they brushed off warnings that slashing spending in depressed economies would deepen their depression. Instead, they listened to economists telling them what they wanted to hear. It was,  as Bloomberg Businessweek put it, “Alesina’s hour.”

The professional consensus not always right, Krugman allows. It’s just that politicians increasingly pick the wrong so-called experts to believe. “Bear in mind that the American right is still taking its economic advice mainly from people who have spent many years wrongly predicting runaway inflation and a collapsing dollar,” Krugman reminds. “All of which raises a troubling question: Are we as societies even capable of taking good policy advice?”
Sadly, the answer seems to be ‘no.’ Not in the realm of economics. And not, most glaringly, in the realm of climate change.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-reveals-devastating-reason-knowledge-not-power?akid=12082.123424.zhQa0i&rd=1&src=newsletter1013815&t=11

Will-obama-finally-get-some-credit-for-the-improving-economy?

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Source:  WashPo

Author: Paul Waldman

Today’s jobs report was a very good one: 288,000 new jobs were created in June, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent, the lowest it has been since September 2008, just before the crash. Furthermore, we’ve now had five consecutive months with more than 200,000 jobs added, which hasn’t happened since 1999-2000. So will Barack Obama get the credit?

Probably not. First of all, we shouldn’t get too excited; there are still a lot of people looking for work, there are a lot who have gotten discouraged and dropped out of the labor force, and there are a lot working part time when they’d rather have full-time jobs. But even if everyone is in agreement that things are looking up, the president can expect to get partial credit, at best.

Obama’s economic ratings have never been very high, at least since the initial honeymoon of his election wore off. In fact, they’ve hovered around 40 percent for most of his presidency, as this chart aggregating results from a variety of surveys (courtesy of Huffpost Pollster) shows:

The most important reason for this is, of course, the simple reality that the economy hasn’t been that great in the past six years; even when there have been a couple of good months in a row, the hole the country has been trying to climb out of was so deep that no one could honestly say things were going splendidly. But there’s a partisan element too, in that ratings of the president have become much more clearly predictable by party in the last decade or so. If you look at the polarization of Gallup approval ratings — the difference between how Democrats rate the president and how Republicans rate him — you see that 10 of the 12 most polarized years ever came in the presidencies of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

That means that no matter how good the economy gets, only a tiny number of Republicans will ever say that Obama is doing a good job on the economy. Just as Democrats tend to do under a Republican president, if things go badly they’ll say it was his fault, but if things go well they’ll say he had nothing to do with it. That will put a ceiling on how high his economic ratings can rise.

Even with five months of good job growth, Americans aren’t yet convinced that the economy is humming. But what if four months from now — just before the midterm election — we’ve had nine months of solid growth? If that were to happen, it would almost certainly show up in President Obama’s approval ratings, as the good news disseminates through the media and people see the effects in their own lives and communities. But it might not make much of a difference in the midterm elections, which are far less affected by the economy than presidential elections.

In other words, President Obama and Democrats can take heart in the economic news — but not too much.

Emphasis Mine

See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/07/03/will-obama-finally-get-some-credit-for-the-improving-economy/

Bad News For Republicans: Obamacare Still NOT A Job Killer As 217,000 Jobs Added In May, Healthcare Adds The Most

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Source: Addicting Info

Author: Stephan D. Foster, Jr.

On March 31, 2014, the Obamacare open enrollment deadline passed. Over 8 million Americans successfully enrolled and gained health insurance coverage. Over six million more gained coverage through Medicaid expansion. Despite Republican claims that the sky would fall and send the US job market into a death spiral, it did not fall and it still hasn’t.

For the fourth consecutive month, the economy added more than 200,000 jobs, and healthcare led the way in creating those jobs. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 217,000 jobs were added in May. Healthcare was responsible for approximately 55,000 of those jobs. And that’s not the only good news.

The jobs report is even sweeter because it means the United States has finally recovered all of the jobs lost when the economy crashed during the Bush Administration in 2008. It also marks the first time that the economy has added 200,000 jobs for four straight months since 1999-2000, when another Democrat, Bill Clinton, occupied the White House. Additionally, the unemployment rate still stands at 6.3 percent, which is a six year low since the rate peaked at 10 percent in 2009 just after Obama took office.

Even though Republicans have crusaded against President Obama’s signature healthcare law all these years by claiming it to be a job killer, the evidence clearly shows that they’re totally wrong. In fact, Obamacare actually creates jobs. The job creation power of Obamacare even goes beyond the healthcare sector. Implementing a healthcare system that will handle an influx of millions of people demands the growth of many fields, including many outside of healthcare. Not just doctors, nurses, and physician assistants, but also jobs in payroll services, computer programming, attorneys, medical bill coders, consultants, customer service, human resources, occupational therapy, and educators. A system that is expected to help way more than 14 million Americans simply cannot do its job unless more workers are hired to fill the increased need.

This isn’t the only bad news the GOP has received about Obamacare in recent months. A recent poll indicates that uninsured rates have fallen across the board throughout the nation, especially among African-Americans and Hispanics. Furthermore, a separate poll reveals that Americans now support Obamacare and a report from the Congressional Budget Office predicts that the law will save an additional $104 billion in costs. It looks like conservatives are all out of doomsday claims about Obamacare.

Obamacare has not only strengthened America’s healthcare system, it has strengthened the economy as well. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are being added every month now and millions of people are gaining access to health insurance. That’s a victory for President Obama on two fronts of domestic policy: the economy and healthcare. It’s fantastic news for Democrats and terrible news for Republicans as the country heads toward the 2014 midterm election in November. Just make sure to remember which party brought you a better healthcare system and an improved economy and which one openly attempted to sabotage both.

 

Emphasis Mine

 

See: http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/06/06/bad-news-for-republicans-obamacare-still-not-a-job-killer-as-217000-jobs-added-in-may-healthcare-adds-the-most/

New Polls Show Democrats Are Doing Better In Races Across The Country, Including The South

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Source: Addicting info

Author: Alan J. Mostravick

“Even just a couple of months ago, the word around the campfire was that this November was going to suck and suck hard for Democrats. Polls showed them hobbling into election season with poor jobs numbers, a flawed and failing Obamacare and a congressional delegation unable to draw their Republican counterparts into any type of consensus.

When, on May 2, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released their report that the unemployment rate had fallen another .4 points to a 6 year low 6.3 percent, the argument that Obama and the Democrats were bad for the economy began to ring hollow. Just imagine how much better that figure could have been and sooner had it not been for the completely obstructionist Boehner-led House of Representatives.

For months after the botched website launch, conservative pundits and lawmakers reveled in what they predicted would be the abject failure of the President’s signature healthcare reform law. First, there was no way the program was going to reach it’s necessary 7 million enrollees. But the chorus of criticism didn’t stop when Obamcare managed to sign up an estimated 10 million individuals through the program and expanded state medicaid programs. With a creative bit of goalpost movement, they then gleefully doubted those who signed up would actually pay their premiums. The insurance companies have debunked that silliness by reporting upwards of 85-90 percent of premiums. Another conservative talking point hoisted by its own petard.

As far as working with the ‘Party of No’? The Republicans have shown absolutely no proof that they intend to play nice across the aisle and work for the good of the country. So, perhaps what needs to happen is a big win for Democrats in the upcoming elections. And now we have several polls (even by notoriously conservative-leaning firms) that show this could no be a distinct possibility.

Both Fox News and the Rasmussen Reports have many Democrats in a statistical dead heat or even leading in their mid-term races, even in the rabidly Republican south. This is good news for many candidates but it is particularly good for southern Democratic Senate candidates Mark Pryor (AR), Allison Lundergan-Grimes (KY) and Michelle Nunn (GA), whose eventual victories will keep the Democratic majority in the Senate and will, in one instance, unseat a particularly vitriolic minority leader.

Many Democratic consultants are urging candidates to run on, (rather than run away from), issues like Obamacare and the economy. With the recent and continual good news on those fronts, that is cogent advice that should be heeded. With a big enough win in the elections, perhaps the Republicans in the House will understand that the country is tired of the petty politics of #Bengazi, Repeal and Replace, and the other obstructionist tactics currently being employed by that party.”

Emphasis Mine

See:http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/05/16/democrats-polling-well/

Give Karl Marx a Chance to Save the World Economy: George Magnus

s he wrote in “Das Kapital,” companies’ pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the poor and unemployed: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery.”

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Karl Marx and the World Economy

By George Magnus

“Policy makers struggling to understand the barrage of financial panics, protests and other ills afflicting the world would do well to study the works of a long-dead economist: Karl Marx. The sooner they recognize we’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime crisis of capitalism, the better equipped they will be to manage a way out of it.

The spirit of Marx, who is buried in a cemetery close to where I live in north London, has risen from the grave amid the financial crisis and subsequent economic slump. The wily philosopher’s analysis of capitalism had a lot of flaws, but today’s global economy bears some uncanny resemblances to the conditions he foresaw.

Consider, for example, Marx’s prediction of how the inherent conflict between capital and labor would manifest itself. As he wrote in “Das Kapital,” companies’ pursuit of profits and productivity would naturally lead them to need fewer and fewer workers, creating an “industrial reserve army” of the poor and unemployed: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery.”

The process he describes is visible throughout the developed world, particularly in the U.S. Companies’ efforts to cut costs and avoid hiring have boosted U.S. corporate profits as a share of total economic output to the highest level in more than six decades, while the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent and real wages are stagnant.

U.S. income inequality, meanwhile, is by some measures close to its highest level since the 1920s. Before 2008, the income disparity was obscured by factors such as easy credit, which allowed poor households to enjoy a more affluent lifestyle. Now the problem is coming home to roost.

Over-Production Paradox

Marx also pointed out the paradox of over-production and under-consumption: The more people are relegated to poverty, the less they will be able to consume all the goods and services companies produce. When one company cuts costs to boost earnings, it’s smart, but when they all do, they undermine the income formation and effective demand on which they rely for revenues and profits.

This problem, too, is evident in today’s developed world. We have a substantial capacity to produce, but in the middle- and lower-income cohorts, we find widespread financial insecurity and low consumption rates. The result is visible in the U.S., where new housing construction and automobile sales remain about 75% and 30% below their 2006 peaks, respectively.

As Marx put it in Kapital: “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses.”

Addressing the Crisis

So how do we address this crisis? To put Marx’s spirit back in the box, policy makers have to place jobs at the top of the economic agenda, and consider other unorthodox measures. The crisis isn’t temporary, and it certainly won’t be cured by the ideological passion for government austerity.

Here are five major planks of a strategy whose time, sadly, has not yet come.

First, we have to sustain aggregate demand and income growth, or else we could fall into a debt trap along with serious social consequences. Governments that don’t face an imminent debt crisis — including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. — must make employment creation the litmus test of policy. In the U.S., the employment-to-population ratio is now as low as in the 1980s. Measures of underemployment almost everywhere are at record highs. Cutting employer payroll taxes and creating fiscal incentives to encourage companies to hire people and invest would do for a start.

Lighten the Burden

Second, to lighten the household debt burden, new steps should allow eligible households to restructure mortgage debt, or swap some debt forgiveness for future payments to lenders out of any home price appreciation.

Third, to improve the functionality of the credit system, well-capitalized and well-structured banks should be allowed some temporary capital adequacy relief to try to get new credit flowing to small companies, especially. Governments and central banks could engage in direct spending on or indirect financing of national investment or infrastructure programs.

Fourth, to ease the sovereign debt burden in the euro zone, European creditors have to extend the lower interest rates and longer payment terms recently proposed for Greece. If jointly guaranteed euro bonds are a bridge too far, Germany has to champion an urgent recapitalization of banks to help absorb inevitable losses through a vastly enlarged European Financial Stability Facility — a sine qua non to solve the bond market crisis at least.

Build Defenses

Fifth, to build defenses against the risk of falling into deflation and stagnation, central banks should look beyond bond- buying programs, and instead target a growth rate of nominal economic output. This would allow a temporary period of moderately higher inflation that could push inflation-adjusted interest rates well below zero and facilitate a lowering of debt burdens.

We can’t know how these proposals might work out, or what their unintended consequences might be. But the policy status quo isn’t acceptable, either. It could turn the U.S. into a more unstable version of Japan, and fracture the euro zone with unknowable political consequences. By 2013, the crisis of Western capitalism could easily spill over to China, but that’s another subject.”

(George Magnus is senior economic adviser at UBS and author of “Uprising: Will Emerging Markets Shape or Shake the World Economy?” The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the Bloomberg View editorial board: view@bloomberg.net.

emphasis mine

see:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-29/give-marx-a-chance-to-save-the-world-economy-commentary-by-george-magnus.html

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

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Written in 2004.

“How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

By GARRISON KEILLOR

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, shriekChristians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shreiking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.

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Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its 34th year on the air and a syndicated newspaper columnist.

Emphasis Mine.

see:http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/7193-were-not-in-lake-wobegon-anymore