If there be any doubt, any question, as to the reality on "Main Street America", listen to those that have lost everything due to no fault of their own. You cannot "spin" tragic reality, even if you are a professional politician with a focus on climbing the political ladder. It's very difficult to put a spin on growing poverty and homelessness, banks going under, record home foreclosures, over 43 million on food stamps, proper health care unaffordable to most citizens, two "never ending" wars, import and energy dependency, the shameful astronomical national debt, and the promise of "Change" that never comes, except for non-beneficial and negative "Change".

The "math", facts and figures on Main Street America, greatly differ from biased "math" used by the Washington Spin Machine. Without including all factors which do, and can, influence the results, professional politicians often use "doctored math" to spin informmation towards their benefit. Also, information compiled by the government, for the government, is not the same as information researched and compiled by independent private sources and agencies.

Without looking at the numbers, Main Street America is fully aware of the economically devastating affects associated with NAFTA, CAFTA, and individual corporate agreements that send American jobs outside of our boarders. Again, you cannot "spin" the pain being felt by John Q. Public. And, how can anyone put a spin on tent cities popping up across this country during 2009 and 2010, the empty shelves in community food pantries, and entire families living in shelters, many for the first time ever.

Very often we hear Republicans blaming Democrats, and Democrats blaming Republicans, but neither side stands for the people, and stands against the other side. In reality, the name of the game in Washington is "politics as usual", and has been for many decades now. Basically, both parties are anti-America, and the proof to that statement is being felt all across this nation, and appears in the daily headlines.

The bottom line amounts to "taxation without representation". We elect representatives on election day, then basically give them Carte Blanche for the next four years to exert their will, and not the will of the people.

I've tried to go back through all of the user accounts and past writers/contributors to the site, give them an Author account.

Still, I might have missed some people, so if you don't see it and want an Author account, don't forget to let me know. It's a huge list of people on EP, so odds on I missed some.

Also, again, before writing, make sure one knows how to format their posts for professional level publication, isn't committing copyright violations, citing their posts and the worse formatting sacrilege, know how to format a URL.

There are buttloads of tools on EP to help with this, and if worse comes to worse, you can email for help.

There are a few people who had their authoring privileges removed. Those people were not following the rules, not making sure their post was original, unique to them and backed up by statistical facts, references, theory, citations or anything based in reality.

Remember, opinions are everywhere, data is buried.

Hey folks, The Economic Populist is ranked #13 in the top 49 economics sites for visual aids, otherwise known as charts, graphs, tables, equations and even further known as eye candy.

Thank you online MBA and even more thanks goes to the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED tools. Without them, we would have to create all graphs by hand.

We do create graphs by hand, by running the raw data in a spreadsheet, that said, it takes much longer than using the FRED system.

So far, "web technologies" graphing tools to automatically graph up data in blogs leaves much to be desired. If someone knows of an API or system that works, is easy to use and is fast, creates optimized images (graphs), please let me know.

I'd like to add more visual aid/multimedia to the site as I find them, which actually works consistently.

Online MBA has put together a great list, although they missed EconomPicData (see the left glorified blog roll).

I agree with them, I'm right brain and a visual, really gives the big picture quickly on a sheet of numbers. One can write equations all day long, description text all day long but if those numbers and equations are not explained in plain English, your audience just shrunk to those with an economics or math degree (as well as right brain, which is about 10% of the U.S. population last I checked).

Folks, just a reminder, the series, that's the SMC, the FMN and the Saturday around the Internets are all open threads. Whatever you want to talk about, or use it to quote some outrage, or fact you want others to see.

This is an FYI, and the pattern could make one dynamite post. i.e. poison our dogs, poison toothpaste, drywall that poisons the home, the list goes on and on...

so now we have toxic fish being imported. No inspections, no home country regulations.

You're eating that 6 eyed Wally. Just came out in the last couple of weeks that fish and you cannot even tell where it came from, much of it is loaded with toxins, chemicals, mercury.

We have a lot of people on this site and most don't want to write full bore articles (understood, it's a LOT of work!), That said, most everyone has great things to say and be aware of.

Of those who haven't bought the farm by now (how much of a farm could be bought today with those $10,000 life insurance policies? -- I still have mine, though I can't explain whjy) -- how many are subsisting on cat food and waiting for SS check to arrive? I guess the joke is on them, and on us too -- the Greatest Generation put their lives on the line to defend our way of life, and we followed them ready to defend our industrial democracy -- our system -- only to see it raped by corporate and financial oligarchs. Kind of reminds you of the Russians stripping Germany of industrial plants during the post WWII occupation. Substitute American jobs for factories and the comparison is apt -- rape by any other name. But then, multinational corporations have no loyalty -- kind of makes you nostalgic for Huey Long and Eugene Debs.

Immelt? Was he the guy who said there was ""no downside" to GE stock price when it was at $33? Wasn't he CEO of GE when he said the $1.60 dividend was safe, then cut it to 40 cents a share? My (now 96 year old) mother had 4,000 shares in her retirement portfolio -- She sold a thousand of them at 38, then she still saw the rest plummet. I wouldn't trust this guy to wax my car!

Now the question is "Should we trust a president who would name this guy to advise him on matters financial?"

They plan to allow Mexican truckers into the U.S., which will displace a host of U.S. citizen truckers.

The plan is to expand and go through Mexican ports, upon which to use NAFTA for further tariff reductions and ease of getting into the U.S. plus labor arbitrage.

So, he's got it right except that missing piece of Mexico.

Thanks for the heads up on this piece. Consider getting an account so you can post stuff like this without moderation.

I believe we just had a corporate takeover of the United States no one noticed a single gun was not fired in the process.

BTW: In case anyone believes this agenda is based in some sort of economic theory, it is NOT, beyond multinational short term agendas.

Literally I've seen "papers" spinning assumptions, equations, statistics and the theory to get it to conclude what they want it to conclude.

This to me is another frightening series of events....the destruction of objectivity and any scientific methods in order to claim "pre-determined desired result".

Very frightening.

This is Chinn's mathematical regression analysis, here. I'd claim he is missing some variables in his analysis, but the bottom line, the guy uses regression analysis in the first place vs. just spews up whatever philosophy is handy.

What's good about this analysis is the point, and I think it gets lost in so many trying to get anywhere on stopping China's currency manipulation, is there are a lot of other factors creating the trade deficit with China.

If you can follow any mathematics, you should try to parse this, plus the above research paper.