..sir,

your thoughtful tirade could be reduced to meaningful focus by contrasting "markets" with "finance"...and showing how they differ-what roles each plays...

..try doing a "greenspan" with "free finance" rather than "free market", and see what I am describing..

first-2000, "financial sector" generated 19% of U.S. economics....but by 2007, that number had risen to 41%....

second, "derivatives" valued under $2 trillion, 2000, but over $600 trillion, 2007...

some of us saw writing on wall before 2005, when bushitters allowed credit card lobbyists to write new bankruptcy law...what did this
event lead you to believe? We thought millions of Americans would go bankrupt...

and what do bushbama advocations for NDAA, Trans-Pacific Partnership, furthering illegal surveillance, and devolving of "Social Security" lead you to conclude??

good night and good luck

The shape of the distribution and the amount of people earning less than 30k is a bit sad. A graph with the purchasing power compared to the average salary would help!

This is just reflecting the fact that many people are absolutely working for nothing nowadays, for example, in the internships that we've brought up here and on other sites. Those pay $0 (and actually cost people to work in them because the intern has to pay for food, fuel, insurance, etc. while providing free labor) and are affecting every single industry and every age group. That plays a huge role because it's a not-too-clever way of avoiding minimum wage laws. Same for "fellowships" and other new job titles that drop wages for people with education and experience. Also, people are now forced into short-term contracts and freelancing. Despite all the business media hype about choosing your own adventure and ways to make billions as a freelancer, if someone doesn't get a freelance job for 12 months that pays $40,000 - whatever and enough to cover his own and his family's benefits, insurance, etc., then he/she is much worse off and the median salary should reflect it. And with more unemployed or contractors or freelancers out there scratching for any cash, the median wage has to drop and employers can lower their wages further in return for labor.

Read gawker unemployment stories, I think it's up to volume 20, those are great and typical stories of the situation on the ground. Absolutely accurate, vast majority are typical, "Lost a job, searching for 1-5 years, overqualified or can't find anyone to hire me after college or grad school, replaced by cheap clueless labor that kisses ass, lost house/apartment, networking and job applications are so much bull, etc." Society simply can't have this many people earning $0 or just enough to pay for food but no rent or no car if a vehicle is needed for a job.

Greece was on PBS last night. Central banker admitted things will get tougher, already at 50% unemployment and people are suffering from preventable diseases because of crumbling health care system. But he said the people should have faith that when the recession is over, austerity will have worked out for them. The question that wasn't immediately asked is why aren't central bankers and politicians suffering with the populace too and only get to impose it? Other questions: how long can/should people suffer? when will the recession end and how did he know it would end when they can't predict or do anything effectively to begin with? why should people go homeless and/or watch loved ones die when people at the top that are corrupt and/or never busted their ass or behaved ethically are rolling in millions and billions of dollars?

Yup, that's about it, why bother saying anything else. 2012 and this is happening. But oh no, don't dare cry out against outsourcing, visa fraud + abuse, or corruption at all levels. 2012 and this is actually happening. But hey, just saw on HGTV some people built a luxury home in Phoenix and drilled 7 foot holes into the mountain to put beds into a mountain and on "Luxury Log Cabin Homes," some dude wanted what "pioneer families had," so he did what they did, which was apparently shell out tens of thousands of dollars for taxidermy for animals he didn't shoot/eat, use 250+ year old trees to build his 9,000 ft2 house that had to be driven down a half-mile private road by dozens of big rigs one at a time, and do it all like, you know, the pioneers did. Hey, all is well, tens of millions of my fellow citizens are unemployed + dying with no hope despite their skills and degrees and service, but the megarich are drilling into public mountains to build their homes and chopping down trees to build 9,000 square foot homes because it's the new Manifest Destiny baby. And if you're looking to the US Government for help and truth, well, me thinks tens of millions of other Americans might have some bitter experience with that over the last 400 years. This economy and government will turn anyone into a radical aka Payne or Jeffersonian freethinker. Less than $5k in 2012?! And we're living in a republic that's looking out for us? Yeah, whatever. Why don't the megarich and completely corrupt just build mini or full-size versions of Versailles while we're at it, and to keep it completely historically accurate, build them the same distance from major cities as Versailles was located from Paris. I mean as long as we're going down this path, let's go all the way, why half-ass it? Is there no shame, no foresight, no sense of history? Really?

I don't get bogged down with the whole D vs. R, "liberal vs. conservative," Communist vs. Capitalist label stuff. It's all a puppet play. These people worship themselves and the $ (or Yuan or Yen or Euro). They don't stick to labels, values, or consistent ideas, so why should we? They all worship profit above all else, their own egos, and anything else they want or like. Bloomberg was a Democrat, until he wanted to be Mayor, so he switched to R, then he became "independent." See how easy that was for him. Koch is a capitalist patriot, unless there's $ to be made, then he'll support Uncle Joe. His kids love America and Fox News, unless Iran can make them money (and there's a whole lot of money to be made if you can break sanctions, basically you own a monopoly because everyone else seems to value laws - too bad for them). So they love freedom of religion and US troops, unless the Mullahs can make them money, and then they'll support the Mullahs and those who attack our military. See? Easy enough for those without integrity. And it goes on and on. Nazis are bad, unless those same Nazi know how to build rockets or can hunt Communists, then they aren't apparently so bad and could come here post-WWII. Contracts must be enforced, unless of course the powers that be don't want them enforced. Freedom of the press is critical and competition is critical, unless a recent immigrant wants to consolidate the press and squelch debate and criticism. Media figures love the 1st Amendment, but the 2nd Amendment many of them despise. Those with compassion coming out of their eyes will get super pissed if the guy that keyed their car is never arrested and put in jail. If the same big people get pulled over for speeding, oh man, the cop must be reprimanded and fired or else. If someone uses drugs, he must be lazy and an addict. If the powerful person whining about lazy addicts is busted, it must be political witch hunts.

It's all hypocrisy and double standards all around on every side. It goes on and on. If there's money to be made these people will call themselves whatever it takes to make that cash. They'll also be more than willing to sacrifice anyone and everything for that extra dollar.

Guess who's blessing all of us with his smirking mug on Forbes (granted, a useless rag for that idiot beneficiary of nepotism - Steve Forbes)? Why, it's Mr. Charles Koch. Sure, it's a month old, but still his face is scaring children at public libraries - I guess they have to keep it for archival purposes. I didn't dare give myself an ulcer by reading through the fawning piece (I'll assume), but I've got to assume the interview didn't ask the plutocratic criminal how come he fancies himself a representative of American freedom and liberty when his daddy made those big bucks helping Stalin develop his infrastructure while Stalin was killing all sorts of people in the 1930s on. How many Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Jews, Germans, Chechnyans, Kazakhs, Finns, etc. were tortured, deported, and/or killed whileDaddy Koch could pretend to be a patriot, trade with Stalin, and then have his sons repeat the same charade? I'll assume the article didn't dig into Koch boys trading with Iran, a US-government denoted terrorist sponsor that would get Average American locked up in a federal pen. Koch, patriot, fawning articles? Just another symptom of double standards at every level and in ever sector of the globe nowadays, especially here.

And of course the Prez is on Rolling Stone (I think this is #50,000 as far as articles or awards given to him). For a man that hasn't really helped the 99% or taken on bankster criminals, he sure does get praised like he cares. Time to have a "beer summit," but no time to rebuild the American middle class or have the DOJ indict 10,000 bankster and other corporate criminals? Really? Oh well, he'll be so much richer when he joins a foundation after 2016 or gives speeches to his former fundraisers at $300,000 a speech like old Bill C.

And in case you wanted to read The Atlantic, it's got Mr. Big Soda is Bad Bloomberg on its cover talking about his bold decisions and how he's a brave thinker. Damn, the media is in full grovel mode. Sure, Bloomberg hates personal freedom, sends police outside his own state to stir up trouble when he should concentrate on running the biggest city in the US. Sure, he protects banksters that launder money for terrorists but never criticizes them and bashes protesters exercising their First Amendment rights and police that mace them in the face. Sure, he wanted to run the NYC Marathon while bodies were literally washing ashore and people were (and are) homeless and struggle to house themselves and their kids months after Sandy. And he's working with Murdoch in that bogus "think tank" to import more visa workers. But he's given an article to force his advice on us? But hey, plutocrats and the corrupt run everything today. The elites run everything. If they get caught or ever get called out for all the crap we never could pull, it's an absolute different set of standards. From gun laws (try getting a handgun permit in NYC if you are an average citizen vs. a politician or celebrity - it's a joke in double standards and strict liability for the Average Joe vs. do no wrong for power players) to crimes to media coverage. We are the great, idiotic unwashed masses that have no clue how to walk and talk and need to be locked up indefinitely for voicing dissent or mowing a law too early, but the big banksters, big politicians, and big media puppets can break all the laws they want, get paid handsomely to do it, step on us at every turn, and still get praised like they do nothing wrong on TV screens and in the papers. So, again, why have any faith in this system? The people running the show have utter contempt for democracy and us.

Comments on Drupal suck. It's five years later and still ajax comments do not work which is a sad state of affairs. I'll see what I can rig up.

A never ending issue is spam along with crazies. Currently we have a fairly well working system that auto-deletes and I need one more tweak to keep out spammers, at which point I could enable automatic anonymous commenting. Lots of security problems
and that's just the spammers and site attackers. Lobbyists also have paid (for cents on the dollar) trying to get their bogus stuff on the site.

Lots of security in other words and still need a little more to make sure the spam, crazies and lobbyists cannot abuse and attack the site.

Yeah, we have major, major lurkers on EP as one can see from the reads vs. comments. One of my biggest concerns is the writing itself sucks and that's why they do not comment so I greatly appreciate the compliment!

Merry Christmas all EPers!

The site is going to be upgraded in stages. It's too massive a job and to do it all at once there would be too much downtime and the dreaded bugs are always a huge problem for they seem to only pop up after being on a live production site.

I hope regulars will help me out by reporting bugs and problems. Yes folks, not only am I the main author but I am the site designer and the PHP coder! Server costs are MASSIVE and will become more so, but that's ok, who knew we would turn into a professional analysis site but that's what happened from a shout out hobby that was EP when we started.

I will post in comments when upgrades are happening, but beyond the "site is offline for maintenance", no other major notices are planned. Ok, here are the upgrades I am focusing on which will be in the first stages that would be of interest to EPers.

Stage One Upgrade

Even this will be done in stages, else there will be too much downtime for the site. Not because it's not functioning in one shot in my sandbox (a testing and development site, not online), it is, but because the biggest hassle I always get is bugs popping up in a production site, no matter how much pre-testing and debugging I do before hand.

1. New layout, theme that displays correctly on iOS, Android, tablets, mobile devices as well as all browsers and OSes.
2. Scalable images so one can see the detail of graphs on any device
3. Better finding of older articles and content with new menus, sections
4. Comments located more predominately and more amplified to enable participation
5. Better layout generally and more readable generally.

There is much more to the first upgrade stage, but it's all behind the scenes stuff. Page load speed is the #1 thing to improve so I really want to hear back about page load, site speed. We're looking at use of a CDN as well as adding Varnish, which is an optimization for page load. APC, memcache are already used and will also be used after the upgrade. It's all server stuff though most of the upgrades and yes, I am the server person too. Current server, if anybody is interested is CentOS 6, x64, VPS.

I also have custom code on this site, simply because the functionality desired doesn't exist and anyone interested in that, let me know. EP is based on Drupal and this is an upgrade from 6.x to 7.x +, so I had to rewrite/write custom code to be compatible (Drupal calls PHP scripts modules).

Stage two

One thing I think the site needs is a real forum where anybody can post a topic question and it's a free for all. EP started out as a community site for those wanting to talk about economics, labor issues for the middle class but has turned into a glorified semi-pro newspaper. So, the plan is to make the site more like a newspaper but I would like to get that community feel back since the original point was very few were talking about or even analyzing correctly policy and even statistics for regular working people in America.

The biggest problem in creation of more functionality is breaking links, SEO (Google hates broken links), page speed and bugs (not my bugs, Drupal contributed bugs). So, the focus still has to be on speed, speed, speed, scalable display SEO and readability. (SEO is a fancy term to mean search engines can find your stuff easily).

So, the current "forum" isn't a forum, it's statistical economic report overviews. All of that needs to be restructured as well as archived for older overviews. The type "blog" isn't a blog at all, they are articles so this also needs to be restructured to represented what we turned into from where we started. These are huge restructuring issues, also involving database modification and why it's in stage 2.

Anyway, just let me know your biggest complaint. We have a lot of anonymous comments, people who just want to comment once in a while on something they read and I'm looking to make that easier but more trackable.

Happy holidays and please leave a comment on your biggest "boy is that irritating" thing about EP that you would like to be changed and additionally please be on the look out for bugs. I'll put a comment on site upgrade started, done so you know something was just changed. I expect stage one to be from 12,26.12 to 01.01.13 because this is the least traffic of the year for economic and finance sites.

This is off-topic really for EP, but since you brought it up, military women are getting raped as routine and worse, not only does nothing happen, they are the ones who suffer professionally and financially on top of such a brutal crime against them. It's unreal and nothing changes even though their have been "Congressional hearings" and "Promises". At least India got out and protested.