Activist judges are OK if they are right wing activist judges. These 5 right wing judges legislated directly from the bench. They overturned several state and federal laws and judicial precedence.
Simon Johnson is the economist whose name comes to mind talking about this happening all over again because fundamentally nothing has changed. I don't know about that prediction but so far any "financial reform" has been loaded with Swiss cheese and esp. on one of the biggest culprits, derivatives, so far, reform is nowhere.
I don't know about $50k to every person but I agree on Stimulus money not being wisely spent and it seems a large part of that is state corruption and the way contracts are awarded.
I've put up bits and pieces of news on Stimulus projects, but we need a big overview.
on this. My issue is labor econ. The laws and supply/demand do apply and like it or not, the world is not together enough in other nations at all to have a global union or worker rights, living wages etc in every nation, but I know for a fact there are a lot of Dems who part company on this issue for various reasons, although I'd say the primary one is jobs or national security/sovereignty.
For 20+ years, its been harder and harder to see a difference between the economic policies of either major party. Even someone like me (Gay, Californian, small business person and Big-time social liberal - Fiscal conservative) begins to think the Tea Party could be a viable Political Party to shake us out of this. Some tea-baggers are down right nuts, but at least they are looking to change the status quo.
The critism that Obama is false is valid. He said so many pretty things! But doesn't seem to actually believe any of it. Does the man have a pulse? We elected a candidate and some stepford robot showed up on the first day.
As a middle class guy... here's what I see as our most urgent needs:
1 - RE-regulate banking. Heck, just re-impose the glass act! It worked fine for DECADES and only 10 years after its repeal we are in a crisis.
2 - Abandon NAFTA and so-called fair trade policies. They only seem to benefit other nations. We need jobs and we need to develop manufacture capabilities.
3 - Railroads - it's almost inescapeable that our transportation system is in shambles. RR's are the most energy efficent method of moving goods. Yet the USA is stuck with a system frozen in time. High speed rail is fast, reliable, affordable and safe. Check out Spain!
4 - Education - without high-quality, Free education, we will quickly become an also ran nation. China, India and Korea have been churning out engineers and programmers in an effort to take our innovation/production edge. How do we compete... return to education based on merit, not the ability to pay.
I'd be hard pressed to show 3 comparable non foreclosure sales in my area right now. I see what you are saying though. Our revaluation laws need to be tightened up considerably to protect homeowners from unfair taxation.
Lets say though that we had iron clad revaluation laws here and they were forced to lower values. Then they would simply get an exception for the rate increase and increase the rate till it raised revenue by what they wanted. We have a very weak 4.5% rate limit that can be over ridden in 4 ways. Its useless.
Say there was no over ride available though. How would the town get around state and federal education mandates or union contracts mandating levels of employment and class size etc. Employment levels also apply to fire and police - they are bullet proof.
They will simply tax you till you cannot pay and then they will seize and sell the property. That or Chapter 9 which the state here must approve.
They broke the steel unions by killing tariffs so we could build cheaper skyscrapers. Then they floated the dollar and killed the cost of wages here by creating a fake stat that tracked inflation. Then they went after every other labor group here with NAFTA.
Now high level IT jobs, legal jobs, all types of jobs - white collar jobs and service jobs are being outsourced along with manufacturing.
Meanwhile public labor unions are setting their own labor force levels, taking layoffs to court and bargaining as equals with taxpayers.
I'm middle class and being squeezed.
Not a penny of this stimulus has gone to the non union private sector middle class. Its like the government is at war with people who work for a living except for those that work for the government.
I don't get it did we offend them?
The latest deflationary statistic in my area? The water company has put in for a 12.5% increase (already the second highest rate in the state) because they lost a bundle in the crash with their pension fund investments. Of course the ratepayer just automatically picks up the tab. Thank God there is deflation I couldn't deal with any inflation if this is deflation.
At least the money would go to everyone who will be paying it back. My niece who will be stuck with these bills for her whole life could have used it to pay for a year of college.
I could have invested in new tools and vehicles.
Instead no teachers were laid off in my area and state employees weren't either. They put new sidewalks in three towns over. The roads in my town haven't been paved in over 15 years.
Thanks I guess.
I'll tell you the way things are going we have rushed and done everything possible to get back to the way things were the day before Lehman Brothers went under because thats the order of things and that means its only going to be a few years before it happens again.
Next time will be different though people have already read this book and won't swallow the BS next time watch and see there will be an uprising. The real reason for 'homeland security' will be apparent then.
I consider myself a sane liberal but I have some conservative issues that I strongly back including immigration reform.
As soon as someone makes a case for reform that includes more deportation, e-verify, a wall -anything concrete that slows it or stops it they are labeled racist.
Liberals are very weak minded to believe that this is an argument against illegal immigration. The word illegal is a key here.
The other weak argument is that no one wants 'those jobs'. I laugh at that assertion given our economy and point to the cost of education and social service for their citizen children as far outstripping any taxes they may pay. They are 'tax negative' entities.
It's pretty clear the backlash is coming and it's intense.
At the same time we have a host of groups, riding on the backlash, whose policy agendas are just as insane.
Seriously. So, beyond continuing to blog our brains out, how do we get the focus on sane, practical, fiscally prudent, policy that really works to turn this economy around, for the working stiff, average Joe/Georgina, middle class and not just get more insane policy and legislation that's well, pretty much just as bad?
I think it's going to be a backlash from hell because so many bought into that "Change" rhetoric/propaganda. (I didn't so I'm not so surprised, I mean I didn't see some black guy running, I saw a University of Chicago/Harvard insider who would push that corporate agenda with the worst of the "liberal" sprinklings...
and probably more, we're going to get a "GDP blip" but 2010 and even 2011 are looking so bad, I mean damn bad for most of America in terms of jobs, income, the bread and butter basics.
But it just drives me nuts because if one looks at the statistics, looks at the theory, looks at what works in other nations, looks at history and so forth, I mean how hard is it to enact legislation and policy that actually works? I mean right now we have pundits like Glenn Beck to Keith Olbermann spinning it like no tomorrow and it's so far from actual real economic theory, policy stats it's just a massive misinformation stream?
Like your housing blog piece. Hello! I think when TARP was started someone calculated you could give every homeowner in the United States $50k for the total cost and I often wonder, from a "bottom up" sort of approach, if that would have solved a host of problems so much better than what happened and obviously handing everyone who owned a home in 2008 $50k is pretty extreme and it looks more sane than what they have put together.
Wow. WH is considering shifting right to capture GOP support - ie. Olympia Snowe - good luck with that:
But I have to say, I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama, who seems determined to confirm every doubt I and others ever had about whether he was ready to fight for what his supporters believed in.
way that European integration has unfolded. It depends on crises.
A currency default crisis with Greece would force the EU to either abandon the euro project, or.........
to take every last shred of management of the economy out of the hands of the Greeks.
It may not be stated somewhat more gently, but Athens is probably going to be bailed out in exchange for clearing government budgets, wages, the whole thing with Brussels.
The UK (and Ireland) will probably get the same deal when things there spin out of control and the UK is forced to enter the euro.
What we are talking about is pretty much a total control over countries economies in the same way that Washington has over state governments.
Sovereign credit defaults won't be the end of the euro and EU. They will be the start of something much more resembling a single, federal state.
Much truth and reason in what's said here. Personally, I have come to think being firmly against immigration is the best single litmus test of a politician. If they can pass that hurdle they'll probably be good on other issues as well. Immigration reduction is also probably the single quickest way to really help stuggling Americans. Before each election go to numbersusa.com to check the candidate's immigration report cards!!!
Ya know, because midtowng focuses heavily on deficits, debt, I bet some think he's a "rightie" which is another great reason to keep EP officially "all colors". Keep 'em guessin'.
TV is so positively useless. I'm fairly certain anyone can be a pundit, just as long as they completely miss the point.
Just kidding. DC Dems are absolutely missing the point of yesterday. People want more than anything else is a president and legislators that fight for them. People are not getting that feeling.
Most polls that I have read say that Dems have not gone far enough with health care reform and financial regulatory reform.
One of the reasons I wrote this is we know a hell of a lot of "lefties" are screaming bloody murder over health care due to the insurance lobbyists and big pharma, etc. having a pig fest.
I watch Hardball (Chris Matthews is such a useless mouth) and he can't quite get it why Democrats would vote against passing the Senate health care bill.
I swear, cable TV is so absurd, so useless, they refuse, absolutely refuse to nail the issues to the ones people are voting on. i.e. the above and then trade, jobs, jobs, jobs, opportunity, retirement, jobs.
I've got another bomb and that's going to be "Comprehensive" immigration reform. Dems every time enable massive labor arbitrage under the guise of "pathway to citizenship", which is actually the smallest amount of those bills they try to pass. Most of it is about global labor arbitrage and just decimating, flooding the U.S. labor market. Well, with all of those various agendas, affecting about every occupation in America plus all of the other views....it's a political neutron bomb that will probably wipe out the Democrats from power I think.
and right now, you should see the India BPO industry. They claim "it's raining jobs", all coming from the "Western nations", read United States....
so while we have desperate unemployment, under employment rates, companies, including most who received bail out money, are busy offshore outsourcing even more jobs.
Believe me, this is not about "specialty skills" or any such stuff.
just like credit cards, they don't give shit on how this affects the overall economy, the long term, the middle class...it's all about short term profits.
But research, studies have a tendency to prove it de facto.
The above proposals were based on my experience with this fu*ked up mortgage system we have.
Lenders don't want to fix this problem - they want to "ride out the storm" - thinking that real estate prices will come back. What they are doing is freezing the housing market.
Negative equity is what is wreaking havoc on the housing market but no one wants to directly address this issue.
Activist judges are OK if they are right wing activist judges. These 5 right wing judges legislated directly from the bench. They overturned several state and federal laws and judicial precedence.
Basically, what we are left with is:
Money = Speech
Corporations = People
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Simon Johnson is the economist whose name comes to mind talking about this happening all over again because fundamentally nothing has changed. I don't know about that prediction but so far any "financial reform" has been loaded with Swiss cheese and esp. on one of the biggest culprits, derivatives, so far, reform is nowhere.
I don't know about $50k to every person but I agree on Stimulus money not being wisely spent and it seems a large part of that is state corruption and the way contracts are awarded.
I've put up bits and pieces of news on Stimulus projects, but we need a big overview.
on this. My issue is labor econ. The laws and supply/demand do apply and like it or not, the world is not together enough in other nations at all to have a global union or worker rights, living wages etc in every nation, but I know for a fact there are a lot of Dems who part company on this issue for various reasons, although I'd say the primary one is jobs or national security/sovereignty.
For 20+ years, its been harder and harder to see a difference between the economic policies of either major party. Even someone like me (Gay, Californian, small business person and Big-time social liberal - Fiscal conservative) begins to think the Tea Party could be a viable Political Party to shake us out of this. Some tea-baggers are down right nuts, but at least they are looking to change the status quo.
The critism that Obama is false is valid. He said so many pretty things! But doesn't seem to actually believe any of it. Does the man have a pulse? We elected a candidate and some stepford robot showed up on the first day.
As a middle class guy... here's what I see as our most urgent needs:
1 - RE-regulate banking. Heck, just re-impose the glass act! It worked fine for DECADES and only 10 years after its repeal we are in a crisis.
2 - Abandon NAFTA and so-called fair trade policies. They only seem to benefit other nations. We need jobs and we need to develop manufacture capabilities.
3 - Railroads - it's almost inescapeable that our transportation system is in shambles. RR's are the most energy efficent method of moving goods. Yet the USA is stuck with a system frozen in time. High speed rail is fast, reliable, affordable and safe. Check out Spain!
4 - Education - without high-quality, Free education, we will quickly become an also ran nation. China, India and Korea have been churning out engineers and programmers in an effort to take our innovation/production edge. How do we compete... return to education based on merit, not the ability to pay.
I'd be hard pressed to show 3 comparable non foreclosure sales in my area right now. I see what you are saying though. Our revaluation laws need to be tightened up considerably to protect homeowners from unfair taxation.
Lets say though that we had iron clad revaluation laws here and they were forced to lower values. Then they would simply get an exception for the rate increase and increase the rate till it raised revenue by what they wanted. We have a very weak 4.5% rate limit that can be over ridden in 4 ways. Its useless.
Say there was no over ride available though. How would the town get around state and federal education mandates or union contracts mandating levels of employment and class size etc. Employment levels also apply to fire and police - they are bullet proof.
They will simply tax you till you cannot pay and then they will seize and sell the property. That or Chapter 9 which the state here must approve.
They broke the steel unions by killing tariffs so we could build cheaper skyscrapers. Then they floated the dollar and killed the cost of wages here by creating a fake stat that tracked inflation. Then they went after every other labor group here with NAFTA.
Now high level IT jobs, legal jobs, all types of jobs - white collar jobs and service jobs are being outsourced along with manufacturing.
Meanwhile public labor unions are setting their own labor force levels, taking layoffs to court and bargaining as equals with taxpayers.
I'm middle class and being squeezed.
Not a penny of this stimulus has gone to the non union private sector middle class. Its like the government is at war with people who work for a living except for those that work for the government.
I don't get it did we offend them?
The latest deflationary statistic in my area? The water company has put in for a 12.5% increase (already the second highest rate in the state) because they lost a bundle in the crash with their pension fund investments. Of course the ratepayer just automatically picks up the tab. Thank God there is deflation I couldn't deal with any inflation if this is deflation.
At least the money would go to everyone who will be paying it back. My niece who will be stuck with these bills for her whole life could have used it to pay for a year of college.
I could have invested in new tools and vehicles.
Instead no teachers were laid off in my area and state employees weren't either. They put new sidewalks in three towns over. The roads in my town haven't been paved in over 15 years.
Thanks I guess.
I'll tell you the way things are going we have rushed and done everything possible to get back to the way things were the day before Lehman Brothers went under because thats the order of things and that means its only going to be a few years before it happens again.
Next time will be different though people have already read this book and won't swallow the BS next time watch and see there will be an uprising. The real reason for 'homeland security' will be apparent then.
I consider myself a sane liberal but I have some conservative issues that I strongly back including immigration reform.
As soon as someone makes a case for reform that includes more deportation, e-verify, a wall -anything concrete that slows it or stops it they are labeled racist.
Liberals are very weak minded to believe that this is an argument against illegal immigration. The word illegal is a key here.
The other weak argument is that no one wants 'those jobs'. I laugh at that assertion given our economy and point to the cost of education and social service for their citizen children as far outstripping any taxes they may pay. They are 'tax negative' entities.
It's pretty clear the backlash is coming and it's intense.
At the same time we have a host of groups, riding on the backlash, whose policy agendas are just as insane.
Seriously. So, beyond continuing to blog our brains out, how do we get the focus on sane, practical, fiscally prudent, policy that really works to turn this economy around, for the working stiff, average Joe/Georgina, middle class and not just get more insane policy and legislation that's well, pretty much just as bad?
I think it's going to be a backlash from hell because so many bought into that "Change" rhetoric/propaganda. (I didn't so I'm not so surprised, I mean I didn't see some black guy running, I saw a University of Chicago/Harvard insider who would push that corporate agenda with the worst of the "liberal" sprinklings...
and probably more, we're going to get a "GDP blip" but 2010 and even 2011 are looking so bad, I mean damn bad for most of America in terms of jobs, income, the bread and butter basics.
But it just drives me nuts because if one looks at the statistics, looks at the theory, looks at what works in other nations, looks at history and so forth, I mean how hard is it to enact legislation and policy that actually works? I mean right now we have pundits like Glenn Beck to Keith Olbermann spinning it like no tomorrow and it's so far from actual real economic theory, policy stats it's just a massive misinformation stream?
Like your housing blog piece. Hello! I think when TARP was started someone calculated you could give every homeowner in the United States $50k for the total cost and I often wonder, from a "bottom up" sort of approach, if that would have solved a host of problems so much better than what happened and obviously handing everyone who owned a home in 2008 $50k is pretty extreme and it looks more sane than what they have put together.
Wow. WH is considering shifting right to capture GOP support - ie. Olympia Snowe - good luck with that:
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
way that European integration has unfolded. It depends on crises.
A currency default crisis with Greece would force the EU to either abandon the euro project, or.........
to take every last shred of management of the economy out of the hands of the Greeks.
It may not be stated somewhat more gently, but Athens is probably going to be bailed out in exchange for clearing government budgets, wages, the whole thing with Brussels.
The UK (and Ireland) will probably get the same deal when things there spin out of control and the UK is forced to enter the euro.
What we are talking about is pretty much a total control over countries economies in the same way that Washington has over state governments.
Sovereign credit defaults won't be the end of the euro and EU. They will be the start of something much more resembling a single, federal state.
Much truth and reason in what's said here. Personally, I have come to think being firmly against immigration is the best single litmus test of a politician. If they can pass that hurdle they'll probably be good on other issues as well. Immigration reduction is also probably the single quickest way to really help stuggling Americans. Before each election go to numbersusa.com to check the candidate's immigration report cards!!!
Interesting little blurb from Eyes on Trade.
The sooner we expose neo-liberalism for the fraudulent theory it is the better.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Ya know, because midtowng focuses heavily on deficits, debt, I bet some think he's a "rightie" which is another great reason to keep EP officially "all colors". Keep 'em guessin'.
TV is so positively useless. I'm fairly certain anyone can be a pundit, just as long as they completely miss the point.
Just kidding. DC Dems are absolutely missing the point of yesterday. People want more than anything else is a president and legislators that fight for them. People are not getting that feeling.
Most polls that I have read say that Dems have not gone far enough with health care reform and financial regulatory reform.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
One of the reasons I wrote this is we know a hell of a lot of "lefties" are screaming bloody murder over health care due to the insurance lobbyists and big pharma, etc. having a pig fest.
I watch Hardball (Chris Matthews is such a useless mouth) and he can't quite get it why Democrats would vote against passing the Senate health care bill.
I swear, cable TV is so absurd, so useless, they refuse, absolutely refuse to nail the issues to the ones people are voting on. i.e. the above and then trade, jobs, jobs, jobs, opportunity, retirement, jobs.
I've got another bomb and that's going to be "Comprehensive" immigration reform. Dems every time enable massive labor arbitrage under the guise of "pathway to citizenship", which is actually the smallest amount of those bills they try to pass. Most of it is about global labor arbitrage and just decimating, flooding the U.S. labor market. Well, with all of those various agendas, affecting about every occupation in America plus all of the other views....it's a political neutron bomb that will probably wipe out the Democrats from power I think.
and right now, you should see the India BPO industry. They claim "it's raining jobs", all coming from the "Western nations", read United States....
so while we have desperate unemployment, under employment rates, companies, including most who received bail out money, are busy offshore outsourcing even more jobs.
Believe me, this is not about "specialty skills" or any such stuff.
just like credit cards, they don't give shit on how this affects the overall economy, the long term, the middle class...it's all about short term profits.
But research, studies have a tendency to prove it de facto.
If President Obama wants to build his populist cred, he can start by firing Emanuel, Summers and Geithner.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
The above proposals were based on my experience with this fu*ked up mortgage system we have.
Lenders don't want to fix this problem - they want to "ride out the storm" - thinking that real estate prices will come back. What they are doing is freezing the housing market.
Negative equity is what is wreaking havoc on the housing market but no one wants to directly address this issue.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
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