...your conclusion which is, frankly, a tautology.
If our greatly esteemed President or our Congre$$ was responsive to the people's needs we'd see a vastly different landscape. That landscape will follow a massive earthquake in this nation. An earthquake that will destroy the crumbling, croney capitalism we are seemingly stuck with. But the ruling class has never in history given up it's greed and lust for power in order to keep on ruling. Nope, they always push it that one step to far. Obama is that one step. His 'policies' are absolute lunacy; especially if you are in the top 2%.
Things are about to get so bad that 'Change you can believe in...' will come. On a wave of violence not seen since...oh, say...
"American employers -- more than employers in other nations and more than American employers in earlier downturns -- have imposed the costs of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing business."
This continues a trend of transferring risks from the corporation to the individual worker (e.g. from pensions to 401Ks).
This is exactly what most employers want. A desperate workforce, an economy with too many workers and not enough jobs, so that employees can be lowballed into accepting whatever the employer chooses.
Most employers despise having to COMPETE for labor. Offshore outsourcing and H-1B visas are tools in their arsenal for ensuring an oversupply of labor ... and United States Congress is their facilitator in this scheme to undermine working people.
The problem with the economy in the United States is simple. There are too many people and not enough jobs.
I really enjoy your musings and share your disillusion about mainstream economists. Unfortunately you seem to fall for one economics fairy tale hook, line and sinker. The government budget constraint mythology.
On August 15, 1971, the United States unilaterally terminated Bretton Woods. Since then the US government is the monopoly issuer of its non-convertible, FX free-floating FIAT currency. By definition the US federal government is not revenue-constrained and faces no solvency risk. It can run deficits nonstop and indefinitely. The only constraint on federal spending is what real resources are available in the economy both to the private and the government sector. And I hope you agree, that given a capacity utilization of 75% and unemployment a lot larger than 10% there are plenty of idle resources available for government spending without any danger of inflation.
I don't see this in your post. It was the farmers, to irrigate the fields, that part of this fight was over, they diverted the water for crops.
Farmers vs. Fish.
In Oregon the fisherman always are getting screwed. There is also a huge deadzone off of the coast and various commercial fishing has died off. Halibut seems to be the last one.
I was actually surprised they dated it. That said, in their press release they clearly seem to be gunning for a "double dip" definition and I think it's political, because a recession going on 3 years, technically, is a Depression.
Those folks are extreme economics geeks, so I have a hard time implying that...
We are also getting some very serious bullshit on cable noise, including Dylan Ratigan on "solutions".
It's scary. Many are recognizing "the problem" and then we get "solutions" that are even more middle class squeeze disaster!
So, they are using the economic despair to twist in the wind and try to convince people to endorse bogus and incredibly corporate driven, god awful agendas that will hurt working America even more!
The Bush Administration was very clear and open on the Klamath water issue. Karl Rove came out and said it was to "support the base" of the party.
I guess that meant that fishermen weren't part of "the base" of the Republican Party. Fishermen lost out in the Gulf as well. People that make a living off the Commons will always lose out. Which was the point of my essay.
No wonder you are confused if you didn't understand (or more likely didn't read most of the essay).
Next time I suggest reading more than just the first couple paragraphs.
come on, the U.S. policy on a host of issues guarantees American "cannot compete globally" and that's the point, who can "compete" against 23 cents an hour and an entire different PPP plus a host of government subsidies?
Labor, is a double edge sword in my view, but truly one of the last hold outs keeping any middle class benefits (as many have noted via the Federal Employees Union!)
I'm very aware of the "dark side" on this issue, education and don't even get me going on STEM labor, guest worker Visas and so on, which get a back seat to "other" agendas ...
still, it's really not labor that's the problem here, the problem is U.S. government policies, completely corrupted by corporate lobbyists.
I mean what is "free trade" here about China? Anyone bother to read the China PNTR? You can get even a few pages into it and just be shocked at how it guarantees the U.S. will go down on trade..
as we see in a matter of no time. China has us wiped out in a matter of 3 years really, after that trade agreement came into effect.
I think GDP may be "relative" in the developed nations but it probably should stand for "God Da**ed Paper" in the U.S. And I'm not talking about the pulp mill industry either. I shiver over what counts as "Product" these days.
I don't think the Liberals have confidence in the American labor-force to compete globally, which is why they capitulate to the competitiveness-destroying Labor Unions for votes. But reality brings pain, and pain re-aligns us for the great corrections that are coming.
And those hard working renters get screwed again as the system is once again tailored to help those who have more at the expense of those who have less.
Maybe housing prices should be allowed to drop so honest hard working people don't have to live in slums anymore.
That's right, this country was set up to benefit land owners, wasn't it.
For main st we have targeted tax rates and credits based on onshore labor presence and onshore capital investments. For investors we provide favorable tax rates on investments in companies with onshore presence (capital investment, labor force and source of component materials).
We tell S.E. Asia we have plenty of food and fresh water how about you. And we insist on "fair and balanced trade" instead of this so-called free trade nonsense that is killing us.
And take heart and always remember, it's not how many toys you own, it's how many toys you own in relation to how many your neighbor owns. If your trailer is bigger than his, he's still the "trailer trash".
She's one of the best on pointing out corruption and agendas going on in finance. I try to list sites with a lot of fast moving content over on the right, who say something unique and are not the MSM.
Excellent points and I need (maybe you are of a mind?) and that's a huge thing wrong, the Banksters making up ??? 62% (it's in this report, the breakdown, the latest) of GDP finance capitalism is, while we offshore outsourcing our industrial base...
the entire thing is like "no duh" why we have labor arbitrage, record poverty, low growth, wage repression and the rest of it.
I have enjoyed the recent articles by Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism. The mountain of mortgages created by Wall Street and inadequately documented have contributed to the problem. Courts are tossing out mortgages that have no obvious owner or investor. Millions of foreclosures are being processed in fraudulent and abusive ways. When it was possible to obtain title insurance that protected the buyer based on a "chain of title" showing previous owners and mortgage holders, buying a foreclosure and using securitized loans were not a problem. Wall Street said they could not be "creative" if they were required to follow state laws. Mortgages and real estate are regulated by state laws that differ widely from state to state. The tranched mortgages that were not adequately documented flooded our markets with product that is faulty. Meanwhile the profits from the process have been taken as commissions placed in private accounts probably off-shore. Essentially the bubble produced millions of fraudulent IOU's and the money from the process is gone.
This is really a matter of Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism. Basically Banks vs. every other business type. Global banks have WAY too much power and the so called jobs they create are nothing more than trading slots for highly paid bookies who legally screw municipalities, states and even sovereign countries, as we now see with central banks swapping private toxic securities debt (asset bubble "wealth") for public debt--to be the legacy of our children's futures.
The only way you really change the rules is to take over the banks. But people don't want "socialized finance" (neither do I -- not because I don't want it, but because that's not what this is). So leave the existing private banks alone. They come in all sizes and certain smaller ones are prudent and do not leverage their capital base into synthetic, derivative, hyper-junk securities.
If our United States re-structure their economies so that tax revenues are deposited into new, taxpaeyer-owned State banks (like North Dakota) then we make new rules for new banks. Actually we follow the old rules that worked since 1930's with new banks (Glass Steagall). Then we help underwrite loans for smaller private banks who are doing the right thing. This is a huge departure from what is going on right now, which is where you have the prudent middle class bailing out the mega-bank failures at the top tier of wealth, as well as the entitlement class which Obama wants to dispense "social justice" to with your remaining bailout dollars.
I mispelled it first time around, but I call it "taxploitation".
State banks will not engage in taxploitation, but rather deposit a hefty dividend in the State Treasury through sound fiscal management, extension of tax-revenue backed credit, and a complete divorce from Wall Street and the FDIC - they are bankrupt, we don't need them, and under this new paradigm, if every State does it, and States stop bonding out to the global debt swindle, they can all go to China and Maylasia and wreak havoc there.
And Ben Bernanke and the traitorous FED can follow them there. We don't need a global banking cartel printing our money and controlling interest rates. That's how we got into this mess, by letting the Rothschild banking dynasty gain control of America's checkbook and bank account back in 1913.
Yeah, I'm dreaming, but new realities begin with small dreams. Look at North Dakota. One State that represents a microcosm of the fiscal health of a 1949 America. I don't see the Globalists flaming North Dakota out. Then one more state, then one more.
The Tea Party Patriots will eventually see the light. Their mission statement is right on track for it.
That's what's going on here. We have one set of rules for the uber rich and influential who might or might not be incorporated and another set for everyone else.
How do we get rid of this fallacy that somehow these companies "generate jobs" and that's why they get different rules.
Like the disease it is, the venereal FED cannot be trusted. But it does play the reality game fairly well, despite the Obama admin's recovery fantasy. Sorta like good cop, bad cop.
But you're absolutely correct, the primary reason net worth of households is dropping is the falling value of their real property, which still has a ways to fall, so you can expect household net worth to continue to trend downward.
This grim news doesn't hurt the global economic agenda, rather, it helps it by forcing homeowners (world wide) to feel the pain of the global asset bubble popping. The reasoning here is, if you don't like the bailout of false asset appreciation, fine, watch us stop and your property value falls even further.
The real difference is, households don't get to "hold" the inflated value of their asset bubble on their balance sheets until they "sell" like the too big to fail banks do. If the Financial Accounting Standards Board would change the rules for consumers like they did for the banks, we could all extend and pretend like the unholy alliance of government and Wall Street does.
But debt serfs don't get to pretend their homes are worth their 2004 peak so that they can pay themselves big bonuses with flush credit like the global elite did, flush with our bailout. That taxploitaion only gets to fund THEIR fantasy, not ours. Our fantasy was funded between 2000-2006 through the easy credit they provided to pump the bubble, now contracting into the natural consumer correction which the administration will NOT allow to occur in the global securities bubble.
...your conclusion which is, frankly, a tautology.
If our greatly esteemed President or our Congre$$ was responsive to the people's needs we'd see a vastly different landscape. That landscape will follow a massive earthquake in this nation. An earthquake that will destroy the crumbling, croney capitalism we are seemingly stuck with. But the ruling class has never in history given up it's greed and lust for power in order to keep on ruling. Nope, they always push it that one step to far. Obama is that one step. His 'policies' are absolute lunacy; especially if you are in the top 2%.
Things are about to get so bad that 'Change you can believe in...' will come. On a wave of violence not seen since...oh, say...
...the 1930s.
"American employers -- more than employers in other nations and more than American employers in earlier downturns -- have imposed the costs of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing business."
This continues a trend of transferring risks from the corporation to the individual worker (e.g. from pensions to 401Ks).
This is exactly what most employers want. A desperate workforce, an economy with too many workers and not enough jobs, so that employees can be lowballed into accepting whatever the employer chooses.
Most employers despise having to COMPETE for labor. Offshore outsourcing and H-1B visas are tools in their arsenal for ensuring an oversupply of labor ... and United States Congress is their facilitator in this scheme to undermine working people.
The problem with the economy in the United States is simple. There are too many people and not enough jobs.
I really enjoy your musings and share your disillusion about mainstream economists. Unfortunately you seem to fall for one economics fairy tale hook, line and sinker. The government budget constraint mythology.
On August 15, 1971, the United States unilaterally terminated Bretton Woods. Since then the US government is the monopoly issuer of its non-convertible, FX free-floating FIAT currency. By definition the US federal government is not revenue-constrained and faces no solvency risk. It can run deficits nonstop and indefinitely. The only constraint on federal spending is what real resources are available in the economy both to the private and the government sector. And I hope you agree, that given a capacity utilization of 75% and unemployment a lot larger than 10% there are plenty of idle resources available for government spending without any danger of inflation.
I don't see this in your post. It was the farmers, to irrigate the fields, that part of this fight was over, they diverted the water for crops.
Farmers vs. Fish.
In Oregon the fisherman always are getting screwed. There is also a huge deadzone off of the coast and various commercial fishing has died off. Halibut seems to be the last one.
I was actually surprised they dated it. That said, in their press release they clearly seem to be gunning for a "double dip" definition and I think it's political, because a recession going on 3 years, technically, is a Depression.
Those folks are extreme economics geeks, so I have a hard time implying that...
because I'm with you, and said so, when I overviewed the NBER declaration.
We are also getting some very serious bullshit on cable noise, including Dylan Ratigan on "solutions".
It's scary. Many are recognizing "the problem" and then we get "solutions" that are even more middle class squeeze disaster!
So, they are using the economic despair to twist in the wind and try to convince people to endorse bogus and incredibly corporate driven, god awful agendas that will hurt working America even more!
The Bush Administration was very clear and open on the Klamath water issue. Karl Rove came out and said it was to "support the base" of the party.
I guess that meant that fishermen weren't part of "the base" of the Republican Party. Fishermen lost out in the Gulf as well. People that make a living off the Commons will always lose out. Which was the point of my essay.
No wonder you are confused if you didn't understand (or more likely didn't read most of the essay).
Next time I suggest reading more than just the first couple paragraphs.
come on, the U.S. policy on a host of issues guarantees American "cannot compete globally" and that's the point, who can "compete" against 23 cents an hour and an entire different PPP plus a host of government subsidies?
Labor, is a double edge sword in my view, but truly one of the last hold outs keeping any middle class benefits (as many have noted via the Federal Employees Union!)
I'm very aware of the "dark side" on this issue, education and don't even get me going on STEM labor, guest worker Visas and so on, which get a back seat to "other" agendas ...
still, it's really not labor that's the problem here, the problem is U.S. government policies, completely corrupted by corporate lobbyists.
I mean what is "free trade" here about China? Anyone bother to read the China PNTR? You can get even a few pages into it and just be shocked at how it guarantees the U.S. will go down on trade..
as we see in a matter of no time. China has us wiped out in a matter of 3 years really, after that trade agreement came into effect.
I think GDP may be "relative" in the developed nations but it probably should stand for "God Da**ed Paper" in the U.S. And I'm not talking about the pulp mill industry either. I shiver over what counts as "Product" these days.
I don't think the Liberals have confidence in the American labor-force to compete globally, which is why they capitulate to the competitiveness-destroying Labor Unions for votes. But reality brings pain, and pain re-aligns us for the great corrections that are coming.
http://letthemfail.us/archives/5463.
I love it when Bloomberg does real investigative journalism, their overview of economic reports is so happy talk, this is refreshing.
They discovered GMAC busted for bad affidavits since 2006.
This is a pretty incredible story. BoA foreclosed on a guy who doesn't even have a mortgage.
wrongful foreclosure.
Florida must be a war zone.
And those hard working renters get screwed again as the system is once again tailored to help those who have more at the expense of those who have less.
Maybe housing prices should be allowed to drop so honest hard working people don't have to live in slums anymore.
That's right, this country was set up to benefit land owners, wasn't it.
For main st we have targeted tax rates and credits based on onshore labor presence and onshore capital investments. For investors we provide favorable tax rates on investments in companies with onshore presence (capital investment, labor force and source of component materials).
We tell S.E. Asia we have plenty of food and fresh water how about you. And we insist on "fair and balanced trade" instead of this so-called free trade nonsense that is killing us.
And take heart and always remember, it's not how many toys you own, it's how many toys you own in relation to how many your neighbor owns. If your trailer is bigger than his, he's still the "trailer trash".
She's one of the best on pointing out corruption and agendas going on in finance. I try to list sites with a lot of fast moving content over on the right, who say something unique and are not the MSM.
I might be missing some, suggestions are welcome.
Excellent points and I need (maybe you are of a mind?) and that's a huge thing wrong, the Banksters making up ??? 62% (it's in this report, the breakdown, the latest) of GDP finance capitalism is, while we offshore outsourcing our industrial base...
the entire thing is like "no duh" why we have labor arbitrage, record poverty, low growth, wage repression and the rest of it.
I have enjoyed the recent articles by Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism. The mountain of mortgages created by Wall Street and inadequately documented have contributed to the problem. Courts are tossing out mortgages that have no obvious owner or investor. Millions of foreclosures are being processed in fraudulent and abusive ways. When it was possible to obtain title insurance that protected the buyer based on a "chain of title" showing previous owners and mortgage holders, buying a foreclosure and using securitized loans were not a problem. Wall Street said they could not be "creative" if they were required to follow state laws. Mortgages and real estate are regulated by state laws that differ widely from state to state. The tranched mortgages that were not adequately documented flooded our markets with product that is faulty. Meanwhile the profits from the process have been taken as commissions placed in private accounts probably off-shore. Essentially the bubble produced millions of fraudulent IOU's and the money from the process is gone.
This is really a matter of Finance Capitalism vs. Industrial Capitalism. Basically Banks vs. every other business type. Global banks have WAY too much power and the so called jobs they create are nothing more than trading slots for highly paid bookies who legally screw municipalities, states and even sovereign countries, as we now see with central banks swapping private toxic securities debt (asset bubble "wealth") for public debt--to be the legacy of our children's futures.
The only way you really change the rules is to take over the banks. But people don't want "socialized finance" (neither do I -- not because I don't want it, but because that's not what this is). So leave the existing private banks alone. They come in all sizes and certain smaller ones are prudent and do not leverage their capital base into synthetic, derivative, hyper-junk securities.
If our United States re-structure their economies so that tax revenues are deposited into new, taxpaeyer-owned State banks (like North Dakota) then we make new rules for new banks. Actually we follow the old rules that worked since 1930's with new banks (Glass Steagall). Then we help underwrite loans for smaller private banks who are doing the right thing. This is a huge departure from what is going on right now, which is where you have the prudent middle class bailing out the mega-bank failures at the top tier of wealth, as well as the entitlement class which Obama wants to dispense "social justice" to with your remaining bailout dollars.
I mispelled it first time around, but I call it "taxploitation".
State banks will not engage in taxploitation, but rather deposit a hefty dividend in the State Treasury through sound fiscal management, extension of tax-revenue backed credit, and a complete divorce from Wall Street and the FDIC - they are bankrupt, we don't need them, and under this new paradigm, if every State does it, and States stop bonding out to the global debt swindle, they can all go to China and Maylasia and wreak havoc there.
And Ben Bernanke and the traitorous FED can follow them there. We don't need a global banking cartel printing our money and controlling interest rates. That's how we got into this mess, by letting the Rothschild banking dynasty gain control of America's checkbook and bank account back in 1913.
Yeah, I'm dreaming, but new realities begin with small dreams. Look at North Dakota. One State that represents a microcosm of the fiscal health of a 1949 America. I don't see the Globalists flaming North Dakota out. Then one more state, then one more.
The Tea Party Patriots will eventually see the light. Their mission statement is right on track for it.
Seems there is some sort of cleaning house. Rahm Emanuel Leaving.
That's what's going on here. We have one set of rules for the uber rich and influential who might or might not be incorporated and another set for everyone else.
How do we get rid of this fallacy that somehow these companies "generate jobs" and that's why they get different rules.
Like the disease it is, the venereal FED cannot be trusted. But it does play the reality game fairly well, despite the Obama admin's recovery fantasy. Sorta like good cop, bad cop.
But you're absolutely correct, the primary reason net worth of households is dropping is the falling value of their real property, which still has a ways to fall, so you can expect household net worth to continue to trend downward.
This grim news doesn't hurt the global economic agenda, rather, it helps it by forcing homeowners (world wide) to feel the pain of the global asset bubble popping. The reasoning here is, if you don't like the bailout of false asset appreciation, fine, watch us stop and your property value falls even further.
The real difference is, households don't get to "hold" the inflated value of their asset bubble on their balance sheets until they "sell" like the too big to fail banks do. If the Financial Accounting Standards Board would change the rules for consumers like they did for the banks, we could all extend and pretend like the unholy alliance of government and Wall Street does.
But debt serfs don't get to pretend their homes are worth their 2004 peak so that they can pay themselves big bonuses with flush credit like the global elite did, flush with our bailout. That taxploitaion only gets to fund THEIR fantasy, not ours. Our fantasy was funded between 2000-2006 through the easy credit they provided to pump the bubble, now contracting into the natural consumer correction which the administration will NOT allow to occur in the global securities bubble.
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