Look, here are some examples of socialism: Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment insurance, 8 hour work day, employee ownership of businesses, employee stock options, public libraries, education, fire department, police department, sewers, roads, water, electricity.
All of that is "socialism". That is simply not communism by any stretch.
Also, it is a fallacy, and frankly you need to turn off Glenn Beck, he has zero education in economics as well as politics and it shows....
Countries that are heavily socialist: Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada.
If one notices, these countries were not exactly on the side of the USSR from 1919-1990, minus the strong need to defeat Nazi Germany as an friendship of convenience (lead by the United States and the U.K. one might note).
Note they have a better standard of living and quality of life AND they are kicking the U.S. ass on the economic competitiveness scale. (see World Bank stats).
That is a long way from an totalitarian state like the USSR, which totalitarian dictatorship was the situation there, it was not true communism in the first place. (Anybody recall Stalin, mass murder, wiped out his competition after the revolution, anyone?) China, they are more a dictatorial corporate totalitarian state, esp. these days.
This is what happens without high school civics or Junior high world history. Not to say I didn't blow off my high school civics..
but look, wikipedia is your friend, as is any encyclopedia....
people, please be accurate and understand what you are talking about....
if you want reforms frankly one must start with accurate information as a starting point.
Firstly, this is one noisy stat. So, while the headlines are all OMG, a 29,000 drop, I'd go with the 4 week moving average of 3,500 drop.
This last week's revisions are only 2k higher so this is significant, but that said, I just looked at the not seasonally adjusted and it's a 17k increase, so what can I say, this is beyond belief noisy and one needs to wait for the revisions and to see an overall trend line.
Well, URDRWHO, allow me importantly to point out that the term used here was "peoples' moment", not "peoples' movement", all of which very well may leave us without a question to answer, eh? That notwithstanding, I suppose that the authentic "peoples' moment" to which I referred above likely would be characterized more by a kind of self-assertion aimed ultimately at the recovery of an abused wellbeing than the realization of anything purely abstract or ideological. After all, human beings don't come equiped with ideologies, do they? But they do come with a certain core dignity. And its the recognition of that that would be most fundamental to any "peoples' moment".
Government expenditures are Stimulative, that's what it's all about....but not when they give away U.S. taxpayer funds to create jobs in China, India, buy goods from China, India, create jobs in Germany, buy items from Japan.
I've pounded on this and we just saw how air-o-planes was pretty much all of the increase in durable goods, which is all fine, those are huge ticket items...
but it's NOT fine when government expenditures do not require items be domestically sourced (Buy American) and more important, workers are U.S. citizens, LPR (green card holders) because for every report you read about on these companies offshore outsourcing Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, you can bet money there are thousands of importing guest workers on various Visas which are not mentioned. Whether a worker is sitting in Bangalore or sitting in Seattle, Washington, that worker is displacing a U.S. worker!
peoples movement? Is it only a peoples movement when it is from a certain side. Can the left have a peoples movement, can the right have a peoples movement? Or is a people's movement the ownership of a certain side?
In 1965, living in San Francisco, hair down to my waist and living with communist room mates. The peoples movement meant communism and people that looked and thought the same. They had their protests and mostly they all looked and thought the same. Except for one thing.....I couldn't buy into their communist manifesto. They were a group that continually connived different ways to get government money. They were very adroit at getting SSI and abhorred manual labor. I was a working class stiff and soon drifted from them.
I believe it is the reason I am so opposed to anything close to Socialism. To my Communist friends back then, Socialism was the foot in the door for Communism.
I think there are a whole lot of people who care and are trying to do something, but ya know when an entire nation votes for change and instead gets Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Diana Farrell appointed and ....you can have one guy in the Senate stop a bill or just one guy, chairing a committee, stop any legislation...
well, these are the mechanisms on how Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, et al are running the nation.
Bob, as you know, it's a very big machine and -- just as in the industrial age -- they regard us ordinary folks as "straw dogs." They listen politely, shake our hands, and show us the door. I think it was the labor movement that saved our system once, but now everybody is "professional" or "management," and we seem to have a white collar illusion. The "real management" likes this arrangement. The Tea Party illusion makes noise, but has no program. The smart money bets on the two political parties, where you get your choice between Geithner and Paulson, and of course between Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs.
On the home front, my brother just got a job on a ship (after seeming to be permanetly unemployed for about a year) and we are grateful for his good fortune. Ask him whether he's ready to join a march on the Winter Palace, and he will tell you he can retire in five years. Things are tough all over.
Maybe if things get worse -- call me an optimist but we are not there yet. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, liberal intellectuals focused on mass society, powerlessness, and alienation, but then they became Neocons and signed on with the elites.
One thing Marx and today's financial elites agree on -- labor is a commodity. The LBO artists understood this too well, and why should net present value include pensions, insurance, and paid vacation? But for now, you won't find people marching in the streets -- they are tired, still trying to figure out how to keep their families afloat, and watching Oprah's fantasy TV. Or perhaps (the irony!) Rush Limbaugh telling them who to blame.
We do need some national leaders who will care about America's workers and their families. Elizabeth Warren comes to mind. And maybe Ralph Nader twenty years younger. But for now -- maybe someone in the Obama administration who remembers what it was like to be working class will get his ear. Then there will perhaps be hope.
Frank T.
The Chinese renminbi has depreciated in real effective terms in tandem with the U.S. dollar and is assessed to be substantially undervalued from a medium-term perspective," the IMF said in a note to a G20 ministers meeting in Seoul, South Korea, at the weekend but only released on Monday.
The IMF has said this in the past so I'm not so sure it means much. China seems to be hell bent on blowing off any international pressures on their currency peg to the U.S. dollar.
Indonesian's parliament called for a criminal investigation into a $715 million government bank bailout in a vote that a newspaper described Thursday as a major blow to President Suslio Bambang Yudhoyono.
...
Government ministers with closest involvement in the bailout are key Yudhoyono allies: Vice President Boediono, a former central bank governor who goes by a single name, and Finance Minister Sri Mulayani Indrawati. All three have denied any wrongdoing.
National police spokesman Maj. Gen. Edward Aritonang said police would follow the recommendations and launch an investigation.
I made a huge error, major, outrageous on this post. It seems I had both reports open, looking them over and instead of copying text from the Feb. one I had copied January..
not a single person noticed enough to comment! Eek, am I wasting my time here?
"...but what I fear is we will get a host of "tea partiers", which is the wrong solution for the right problems and that will cause a revolution. In other words, they will get into office and then true poverty, despair will magnify and bam, there we go..."
It is almost as though there might be a natural history to these coming events. Although a year ago the rage of the emerging Tea Party protests was connected directed with events surrounding the bailouts, increasingly it has transmogrified into themes associated more exclusively with the libertarian catechism: A return to the gold standard, deficit paranoia, and a reliance on something like social darwinist principles to guide the economy. Their protestations notwithstanding, as likely as not, Tea Party activists today are to be found in willing association with Republican Party or para-Republican Party operatives, their enthusiasms co-opted and their message compromised. Their patron saint, Ron Paul, a self-seeker who was clearly more interested in 2008 in holding on to a Republican House seat than he was as an independent presidential candidate in setting an example for his hundreds of adolescent true believers, can't even bring himself to disown Sarah Palin's endorsement of his son, Rand's, Kentucky Senate candidacy! Given the obvious name exploitation and their cosiness with the very worst of system and bailout supporting trash, what's left to distinguish the Pauls from those they reportedly oppose?
So we enter the next election cycle with a reactionary right utterly in sync economically with their neo-con antagonists and opposing a disaster of a president with his emasculated, corporatist, congressional majoritarians. And they'll all be talking about "the deficit"! Some "revolution" this. But it may be setting the stage for an economic nosedive that will make the present malaise look like a walk in the park. The rapidly increasing impoverishment of the wage and salary earning classes brought about as a consequence of a newly energized fiscal parsimony just may change some minds about the suitability of Tea Party populism and an authentic alternative might arise. But I'm struck, nevertheless, with the seeming necessity of there being a reactionary precursor stage before any genuine "peoples' moment" might emerge. That's frightening.
I realize that maybe I am the anal-retentive, mathematical police on the site and I'm going to try to loosen up.
My goal is to keep the site highly credible with accurate statistics, theory and analysis....
that's all we have since this is not a "name brand" site, so content must be well sourced and cited.
That said, I sure don't want to repress the Get your Outrage on, because frankly I am personally getting so disgusted as what is going on in D.C., esp. when I look at the daily economic indicators and statistics that imply all of middle class America is under attack and suffering....I would like to scream!
I do it with graphs but believe me, I am screaming bloody murder. Come join and shout out your own!
Honestly we need real change right now on economic policy. We have ZERO financial reform, no direct jobs program, no curtailing of offshoring, no stopping the banksters....
instead we're being sold the "new normal" is permanent unemployment!
I sure cannot cover all of the daily screw jobs and perhaps, esp. for election season is approaching, we should lighten up on political posts on the site.
I really do want people to start learning and paying attention to all things econ, but in terms of who is saying what as policy positions, that is very important!
I do promise to lighten up as the statistical and citation gestapo police. How I am, I have a research background, but I guess I'm coming across as the teacher with the backhand ruler slap.
Sorry to say, the SEC, like Treasury, is completly captured by Wall Street, just as governments the world over are captured by the multi-national banks who own their central bank "Oracles".
As you surely know from what you've written, the Fox is in charge of henhouse security. These people are not in jail because those who would put them there are either in on it, or too frightened or weak to take a stand.
The honest folks who are outraged, like you and I, are so outnumbered (between the crooks and the brain-dead) that if we planned to 1776 these Imperials, it would be a suicide mission....for now....
Keep up the good work though. As more and more people smell the coffee and wake up, "for now" becomes "back then".
-WM http://letthemfail.us
With over 300 million once the gasoline and match meet, the riots will follow. I don't know what will set it off but the USA is a powder keg of discontent.
Yesterday I read a post (not on this site) from someone saying that not passing health care is the same as Marie didn't listen to the people in pre-french revolution days.
I had to point out that it wasn't that the people were asking the government for something, the people wanted the government to lay off of them. Stop burdening them.
"While average tax rates were higher in Britain, the burden
on the common people was greater in France. Taxation relied on a system of internal tariffs separating the regions of France, which prevented a unified market from developing in the country. Taxes such as the extremely unpopular gabelle were contracted out to private collectors (''tax farmers'') who were permitted to raise far more than the government requested. These systems led to an arbitrary and unequal collection of many of France's consumption taxes. ''
So let me see, government increasingly looking for more revenue and often by raising "fees" not taxes. The elite officials are let off easy when not paying taxes, can we say Geithner or Rangel; the elected officials eat Kobe Beef while their flock eat hamburg; the officials take junkets, fly in private jets while their constituents can't take a vacation to the beach; legal bribing of officials with taxpayer money so they will vote yes on a Bill. And now they want to pass a massive thing called health care and tell us that it is going to be cheaper. They stand there in their fancy suits and lie to us. For some reason they know we know it is a lie but they don't care anymore. Arrogance has trumped common sense.
I would say that people are getting very, very upset at what they see in Washington. It could even be a worldwide powder keg.
Look, here are some examples of socialism: Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment insurance, 8 hour work day, employee ownership of businesses, employee stock options, public libraries, education, fire department, police department, sewers, roads, water, electricity.
All of that is "socialism". That is simply not communism by any stretch.
Also, it is a fallacy, and frankly you need to turn off Glenn Beck, he has zero education in economics as well as politics and it shows....
Countries that are heavily socialist: Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada.
If one notices, these countries were not exactly on the side of the USSR from 1919-1990, minus the strong need to defeat Nazi Germany as an friendship of convenience (lead by the United States and the U.K. one might note).
Note they have a better standard of living and quality of life AND they are kicking the U.S. ass on the economic competitiveness scale. (see World Bank stats).
That is a long way from an totalitarian state like the USSR, which totalitarian dictatorship was the situation there, it was not true communism in the first place. (Anybody recall Stalin, mass murder, wiped out his competition after the revolution, anyone?) China, they are more a dictatorial corporate totalitarian state, esp. these days.
This is what happens without high school civics or Junior high world history. Not to say I didn't blow off my high school civics..
but look, wikipedia is your friend, as is any encyclopedia....
people, please be accurate and understand what you are talking about....
if you want reforms frankly one must start with accurate information as a starting point.
Firstly, this is one noisy stat. So, while the headlines are all OMG, a 29,000 drop, I'd go with the 4 week moving average of 3,500 drop.
This last week's revisions are only 2k higher so this is significant, but that said, I just looked at the not seasonally adjusted and it's a 17k increase, so what can I say, this is beyond belief noisy and one needs to wait for the revisions and to see an overall trend line.
this week's initial unemployment claims.
The big kahuna is out tomorrow, monthly unemployment figures so I'm saving my graphs and fingers for that one.
Well, URDRWHO, allow me importantly to point out that the term used here was "peoples' moment", not "peoples' movement", all of which very well may leave us without a question to answer, eh? That notwithstanding, I suppose that the authentic "peoples' moment" to which I referred above likely would be characterized more by a kind of self-assertion aimed ultimately at the recovery of an abused wellbeing than the realization of anything purely abstract or ideological. After all, human beings don't come equiped with ideologies, do they? But they do come with a certain core dignity. And its the recognition of that that would be most fundamental to any "peoples' moment".
Government expenditures are Stimulative, that's what it's all about....but not when they give away U.S. taxpayer funds to create jobs in China, India, buy goods from China, India, create jobs in Germany, buy items from Japan.
I've pounded on this and we just saw how air-o-planes was pretty much all of the increase in durable goods, which is all fine, those are huge ticket items...
but it's NOT fine when government expenditures do not require items be domestically sourced (Buy American) and more important, workers are U.S. citizens, LPR (green card holders) because for every report you read about on these companies offshore outsourcing Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, you can bet money there are thousands of importing guest workers on various Visas which are not mentioned. Whether a worker is sitting in Bangalore or sitting in Seattle, Washington, that worker is displacing a U.S. worker!
People see these layoff notices and believe the job is being eliminated.
This practice should be held illegal.
If they love India and China so much let the company move there entirely and see how that works out.
was and is very scary to me. It can easily be used against legal US citizens.
peoples movement? Is it only a peoples movement when it is from a certain side. Can the left have a peoples movement, can the right have a peoples movement? Or is a people's movement the ownership of a certain side?
In 1965, living in San Francisco, hair down to my waist and living with communist room mates. The peoples movement meant communism and people that looked and thought the same. They had their protests and mostly they all looked and thought the same. Except for one thing.....I couldn't buy into their communist manifesto. They were a group that continually connived different ways to get government money. They were very adroit at getting SSI and abhorred manual labor. I was a working class stiff and soon drifted from them.
I believe it is the reason I am so opposed to anything close to Socialism. To my Communist friends back then, Socialism was the foot in the door for Communism.
So who is the "Peoples movement?"
I think there are a whole lot of people who care and are trying to do something, but ya know when an entire nation votes for change and instead gets Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Diana Farrell appointed and ....you can have one guy in the Senate stop a bill or just one guy, chairing a committee, stop any legislation...
well, these are the mechanisms on how Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, et al are running the nation.
Great comment on the state of things.
Bob, as you know, it's a very big machine and -- just as in the industrial age -- they regard us ordinary folks as "straw dogs." They listen politely, shake our hands, and show us the door. I think it was the labor movement that saved our system once, but now everybody is "professional" or "management," and we seem to have a white collar illusion. The "real management" likes this arrangement. The Tea Party illusion makes noise, but has no program. The smart money bets on the two political parties, where you get your choice between Geithner and Paulson, and of course between Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs.
On the home front, my brother just got a job on a ship (after seeming to be permanetly unemployed for about a year) and we are grateful for his good fortune. Ask him whether he's ready to join a march on the Winter Palace, and he will tell you he can retire in five years. Things are tough all over.
Maybe if things get worse -- call me an optimist but we are not there yet. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, liberal intellectuals focused on mass society, powerlessness, and alienation, but then they became Neocons and signed on with the elites.
One thing Marx and today's financial elites agree on -- labor is a commodity. The LBO artists understood this too well, and why should net present value include pensions, insurance, and paid vacation? But for now, you won't find people marching in the streets -- they are tired, still trying to figure out how to keep their families afloat, and watching Oprah's fantasy TV. Or perhaps (the irony!) Rush Limbaugh telling them who to blame.
We do need some national leaders who will care about America's workers and their families. Elizabeth Warren comes to mind. And maybe Ralph Nader twenty years younger. But for now -- maybe someone in the Obama administration who remembers what it was like to be working class will get his ear. Then there will perhaps be hope.
Frank T.
Reuters:
The IMF has said this in the past so I'm not so sure it means much. China seems to be hell bent on blowing off any international pressures on their currency peg to the U.S. dollar.
It's a disgrace that a country that Indonesia has put us to shame when it comes to justice and political accountability.
I made a huge error, major, outrageous on this post. It seems I had both reports open, looking them over and instead of copying text from the Feb. one I had copied January..
not a single person noticed enough to comment! Eek, am I wasting my time here?
How about registering and creating an account? You have no CAPTCHA and can see who replied to your comments and so on. Way better!
"...but what I fear is we will get a host of "tea partiers", which is the wrong solution for the right problems and that will cause a revolution. In other words, they will get into office and then true poverty, despair will magnify and bam, there we go..."
It is almost as though there might be a natural history to these coming events. Although a year ago the rage of the emerging Tea Party protests was connected directed with events surrounding the bailouts, increasingly it has transmogrified into themes associated more exclusively with the libertarian catechism: A return to the gold standard, deficit paranoia, and a reliance on something like social darwinist principles to guide the economy. Their protestations notwithstanding, as likely as not, Tea Party activists today are to be found in willing association with Republican Party or para-Republican Party operatives, their enthusiasms co-opted and their message compromised. Their patron saint, Ron Paul, a self-seeker who was clearly more interested in 2008 in holding on to a Republican House seat than he was as an independent presidential candidate in setting an example for his hundreds of adolescent true believers, can't even bring himself to disown Sarah Palin's endorsement of his son, Rand's, Kentucky Senate candidacy! Given the obvious name exploitation and their cosiness with the very worst of system and bailout supporting trash, what's left to distinguish the Pauls from those they reportedly oppose?
So we enter the next election cycle with a reactionary right utterly in sync economically with their neo-con antagonists and opposing a disaster of a president with his emasculated, corporatist, congressional majoritarians. And they'll all be talking about "the deficit"! Some "revolution" this. But it may be setting the stage for an economic nosedive that will make the present malaise look like a walk in the park. The rapidly increasing impoverishment of the wage and salary earning classes brought about as a consequence of a newly energized fiscal parsimony just may change some minds about the suitability of Tea Party populism and an authentic alternative might arise. But I'm struck, nevertheless, with the seeming necessity of there being a reactionary precursor stage before any genuine "peoples' moment" might emerge. That's frightening.
What does this picture say to you?
Re: Predatory Lending
Please review this information regarding the National Association of Realtors and the "Code of Ethics."
http://www.ripoffreport.com/Search/scott-veerkamp.aspx
Come on folks, write comments and participate.
I realize that maybe I am the anal-retentive, mathematical police on the site and I'm going to try to loosen up.
My goal is to keep the site highly credible with accurate statistics, theory and analysis....
that's all we have since this is not a "name brand" site, so content must be well sourced and cited.
That said, I sure don't want to repress the Get your Outrage on, because frankly I am personally getting so disgusted as what is going on in D.C., esp. when I look at the daily economic indicators and statistics that imply all of middle class America is under attack and suffering....I would like to scream!
I do it with graphs but believe me, I am screaming bloody murder. Come join and shout out your own!
Honestly we need real change right now on economic policy. We have ZERO financial reform, no direct jobs program, no curtailing of offshoring, no stopping the banksters....
instead we're being sold the "new normal" is permanent unemployment!
I sure cannot cover all of the daily screw jobs and perhaps, esp. for election season is approaching, we should lighten up on political posts on the site.
I really do want people to start learning and paying attention to all things econ, but in terms of who is saying what as policy positions, that is very important!
I do promise to lighten up as the statistical and citation gestapo police. How I am, I have a research background, but I guess I'm coming across as the teacher with the backhand ruler slap.
Sorry to say, the SEC, like Treasury, is completly captured by Wall Street, just as governments the world over are captured by the multi-national banks who own their central bank "Oracles".
As you surely know from what you've written, the Fox is in charge of henhouse security. These people are not in jail because those who would put them there are either in on it, or too frightened or weak to take a stand.
The honest folks who are outraged, like you and I, are so outnumbered (between the crooks and the brain-dead) that if we planned to 1776 these Imperials, it would be a suicide mission....for now....
Keep up the good work though. As more and more people smell the coffee and wake up, "for now" becomes "back then".
-WM
http://letthemfail.us
With over 300 million once the gasoline and match meet, the riots will follow. I don't know what will set it off but the USA is a powder keg of discontent.
Yesterday I read a post (not on this site) from someone saying that not passing health care is the same as Marie didn't listen to the people in pre-french revolution days.
I had to point out that it wasn't that the people were asking the government for something, the people wanted the government to lay off of them. Stop burdening them.
"While average tax rates were higher in Britain, the burden
on the common people was greater in France. Taxation relied on a system of internal tariffs separating the regions of France, which prevented a unified market from developing in the country. Taxes such as the extremely unpopular gabelle were contracted out to private collectors (''tax farmers'') who were permitted to raise far more than the government requested. These systems led to an arbitrary and unequal collection of many of France's consumption taxes. ''
So let me see, government increasingly looking for more revenue and often by raising "fees" not taxes. The elite officials are let off easy when not paying taxes, can we say Geithner or Rangel; the elected officials eat Kobe Beef while their flock eat hamburg; the officials take junkets, fly in private jets while their constituents can't take a vacation to the beach; legal bribing of officials with taxpayer money so they will vote yes on a Bill. And now they want to pass a massive thing called health care and tell us that it is going to be cheaper. They stand there in their fancy suits and lie to us. For some reason they know we know it is a lie but they don't care anymore. Arrogance has trumped common sense.
I would say that people are getting very, very upset at what they see in Washington. It could even be a worldwide powder keg.
I work for Honeywell. Each time an engineer resigns (even for intra-company transfer) we are now replacing the person with someone in India.
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