Democrats used to clean up Republican economy messes

Daily Kos points out the obvious.

A Little Something To Make Your Hair Stand On End....

Sarah Kendzior:

I don’t think he’s going to fulfill his promises to them in order to improve their economic livelihood or keep them safer. I, in fact, think the opposite is going to happen. That’s true because he has frankly stated so, including long before the election. 

For example, in February 2014, Trump went on Fox News to talk about Russia – which we should return to this because it’s very interesting that a reality TV show host would be on TV talking about Russian foreign policy in 2014 – but another thing he said during then, the interview was that in order for America to go back to where it was, to go back to being great, we need total economic collapse and we need riots. He explicitly called for this. His chief advisor and advisor throughout his campaign, Steve Bannon, who is an extreme white supremacist who runs Breitbart Media, which is a conspiratorial, right wing site, has also said similar things. He described himself as a Leninist who wants to destroy the state but I wouldn’t really describe him as a Leninist as much as an accelerationist, which is also what I would describe Trump. 

So there’s so many factors going into this and it’s a little bit head spinning but I’ve been tracking it all year. I became very worried throughout the year that Trump would indeed win; I know the polls said he wouldn’t but I noticed both the genuine popular support that I saw among people here in the center of the country but also a lot of manipulative tactics that remind me very much of how dictators take power, so I think it’s important to take a full look at everything that happened and really investigate because what we will deal with in the future is very dire and I think we should try our best to stop it.

Stalking women, drought, voting fraud, and guns.

Ben Carson's view of women.  Stalking is not romantic.

How to understand and end California's drought.

Lion cub learning how to swim.

Dealing with the radiation fears about Fukushima.

Have self-compassion.

Kansas voting is manipulated.

President Obama is a class act.  Dealing with Native Americans.

Understanding China's economic slowdown.

Ideas for dealing with oceans filled with plastic.

Stating the obvious: The States With The Most Gun Laws See The Fewest Gun-Related Deaths

The little island that could..

Learn from Iceland how to deal with banksters.

edited for extraneous link.

How to start a revolution

Weird, wise and wonderful... and simply stupid

21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity

Dog

The dangers of privatizing things that governments do.

Solar cell breakthrough taps previously unused energy source

11 Bizarrely Wrong Beliefs Americans Have About Themselves

Throwing trash into a volcano as an experiment. I'd be freaked out.





11 facts about the Affordable Care Act

Krugman:

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them. And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.

The answer is yes.

Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?

Thanks for noticing! Finally...

Gridlock in Congress? Blame the GOP

Think the media just realized that the inmates have gotten control of the steering wheel of the bus?

Cassandra would wonder why nothing has changed...

Fascism rises from the depths of Greece's despair

A neo-Nazi party that wants work camps for immigrants is on course to win its first seats in parliament on Sunday

Dumb and dumber

7 Bizarre Trends That Predict an Economic Collapse

 GOP debate audience cheers child labor

  Photo-retouched models.

 

What an incestuously inbred asshole sounds like.

Here we go round the mulberry bush....

Teaching good sex. Will no one think of the children?!1!??

Speaking of children. Taking them to Occupy Los Angeles. But in Portland, watch out for the police.

The next financial crisis. Or signs of hope.

San Francisco

Canada's money has gone plastic.

Might as well declare game over. Goldman Sachs has won the Capitalism Game. Can we start a different game now?

Making money by making more prisoners fills the coffers of private prisons, our very own concentration camps.

I don't think they'll understand the sarcasm...

*Fixed link. Thanks, Steve.

Posted this three years ago....

And we're still paying for his eight year reign of incompetence

Eric Cantor bets on the US failing

He's got money on the table.

Corporate greed

Is why we are in an economic recession.

Bob Herbert has the figures:

The recession officially started in December 2007. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009, real aggregate output in the U.S., as measured by the gross domestic product, fell by about 2.5 percent. But employers cut their payrolls by 6 percent.

In many cases, bosses told panicked workers who were still on the job that they had to take pay cuts or cuts in hours, or both. And raises were out of the question. The staggering job losses and stagnant wages are central reasons why any real recovery has been so difficult.

“They threw out far more workers and hours than they lost output,” said Professor Sum. “Here’s what happened: At the end of the fourth quarter in 2008, you see corporate profits begin to really take off, and they grow by the time you get to the first quarter of 2010 by $572 billion. And over that same time period, wage and salary payments go down by $122 billion.”

That kind of disconnect, said Mr. Sum, had never been seen before in all the decades since World War II.

In short, the corporations are making out like bandits. Now they’re sitting on mountains of cash and they still are not interested in hiring to any significant degree, or strengthening workers’ paychecks.

Productivity tells the story. Increases in the productivity of American workers are supposed to go hand in hand with improvements in their standard of living. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work. That’s how the economic pie expands, and we’re all supposed to have a fair share of that expansion.

Corporations have now said the hell with that. Economists believe the nation may have emerged, technically, from the recession early in the summer of 2009. As Professor Sum writes in a new study for the labor market center, this period of economic recovery “has seen the most lopsided gains in corporate profits relative to real wages and salaries in our history.”

Worker productivity has increased dramatically, but the workers themselves have seen no gains from their increased production. It has all gone to corporate profits. This is unprecedented in the postwar years, and it is wrong.

Wouldn't that be cool?

If Elizabeth Warren took a more active governmental position?:

ON THE day after Tuesday’s electoral loss, the Obama administration brought an unfamiliar face to the White House - Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law professor noted for her staunch advocacy on behalf the middle class and fierce criticism of the bank bailouts. Perhaps the administration will take a more aggressive approach to Wall Street, along the lines of what Warren wants. But for Democrats to truly take ownership of the economic crisis, Warren will need to play a more prominent role. Not just her ideas, but the force of her personality is needed.

[snip]

As chairwoman of the TARP Oversight Committee, she’s been responsible for examining the bank bailouts and the regulatory response. Warren has vocalized the concerns of many Americans - but not many politicians - who are outraged by the rampant greed that led to the crisis, and the refusal of Wall Street to take responsibility. “I think the problem has been all the way throughout this crisis, that the banks have been treated gently and everyone else has been treated really pretty tough,’’ said an exasperated Warren last fall, echoing what so many others - in both parties - have come to believe.

These people need someone of Warren’s stature. The timing is perfect: her term at TARP Oversight will come to an end in the spring of 2011, just as a Senate candidate would have to be ramping up. She’d have a base of support on the Internet as soon as she announces. Sure, a Warren campaign would provoke guffaws from the right: What does a Harvard professor really know about an economic crisis? Yet underneath the polished pedigree is a teenage bride from Oklahoma. She’s as much an everyday person as Scott Brown; she just happens to be a brilliant scholar as well. When she’s championing the middle class, she’s not doing so because it’s politically expedient, but because she feels connected to it in a way few politicians are. And she has the intellectual chops to convert that connection into dramatic policy change. Sadly, few politicians can say that, either.

John Stewart thinks so:

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Elizabeth Warren
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Dear Santa

Send jobs.

Watch the US go down the tubes

As we lose job after job...

h/t to Bryan of Why Now?

Goldman Sachs is in the news

Matt Taibbi:

THE GREAT AMERICAN BUBBLE MACHINE

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again.

And a wonderful reaction to Taibbi's article by Stephen Foley of The Independent:

Perhaps you have heard by now that Goldman Sachs is "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".

It is the opening line of a piece in Rolling Stone magazine, which has been zinging around the email inboxes of Wall Street for the past few days, and which has got Goldman's tentacles all a-twitching with fury.

Matt Taibbi's piece is a rip-roaring read, obviously. It goes over well-trodden ground, listing all the Goldman alumni in positions of power in governments and at regulators around the world (or not listing them actually, since that would be "absurd and pointless, like trying to make a list of everything"), and then accuses the bank of using its influence to get government out of the way so that it can inflate all the recent investment bubbles, from dot.com stocks, through oil prices, to the biggest one of all, the US housing bubble.

In keeping with the hyperbole of the row, Goldman's wonderfully arch spokesman Lucas van Praag described the piece as "an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories," adding: "Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing."

Very funny. The Rolling Stone article is indeed a horribly unfair arrangement of the facts. In these howls of rage against the way unfettered finance led us into boom and bust, it is always tempting to assume Goldman must be uniquely villainous just because it has been uniquely profitable – but it is illogical to single out any one institution for stoking investment mania that by definition has many, many participants.

It is also not true that the US government's bailout of Wall Street was a matter of Goldmanites at the Treasury handing taxpayer money over to help out a few of their friends in banking. That is an outright misrepresentation of what happened last autumn, and if people start to believe it, we will doom ourselves to one day letting the banking system collapse – at which point we will learn all over again how ensuring the soundness of the banks is vital to keeping an economy out of a slump.

Yet there has been something troubling me about Goldman's response to this little flap, and it is this: the sheer lack of humility.

And speaking of Goldman Sachs' lack of humility:

Goldman Sachs bankers in line for record bonuses

Bankers at Goldman Sachs could be in line for record bonuses as compensation on Wall Street looks set to rebound in spite of problems in the wider economy.

And:

NEW YORK -- The U.S. Justice Department arrested a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. employee and charged him with stealing computer codes related to the firm's high-speed trading platform.

Sergey Aleynikov, a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Russia, allegedly unlawfully copied, duplicated, downloaded and transferred computer codes from Goldman Sachs and uploaded the codes to a computer server in Germany, according to a complaint filed by federal prosecutors.

The complaint from the government didn't specifically reference Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was referenced during Saturday's bail hearing, and a person familiar with the matter confirmed that Mr. Aleynikov worked as a computer programmer for the company.

The person familiar with the matter also said, "The theft has had no impact on our clients and no impact on our business."

Paul Krugman singlehandedly makes everyone start buying sacks of rice and beans

And deciding where to dig the bunker....

Will Hutton: You are warning that what happened to Japan could happen to the whole world. Japan's GDP at the end of this year will be no higher than it was in 1992 - 17 lost years. You are saying that this is an ongoing risk, certainly for the North Atlantic economy - maybe the world economy.

Paul Krugman: Yes. It's not that the risk of the Japan syndrome has receded very much. The risk of a full, all-out Great Depression - utter collapse of everything - has receded a lot in the past few months. But this first year of crisis has been far worse than anything that happened in Japan during the last decade, so in some sense we already have much worse than anything the Japanese went through. The risk for long stagnation is really high.