January 11, 2013
Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that saving money is not the path to economic recovery. Instead, he tells Bill, we should put aside our excessive focus on the deficit, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to put America back to work. Krugman offers specific solutions to not only end what he calls a “vast, unnecessary catastrophe,” but to do it more quickly than some imagine possible. His latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them.
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Saturday, January 26, 2013
MSNBC Krystal Ball’s timely rant on Union Membership
25 Jan 2013
MSNBC Krystal Ball’s Timely Rant On Union Membership – Americans, Wake the “F” Up!
Union membership rates are at a 97-year low. She correctly implies that unions are to Democrats what big business and the wealthy are to Republicans. She correctly states that as labor unions go, so goes the middle class. One of her best statements was:
"The America we know and love is the America we know and love because of unions. They fought for better wages, equal pay, equal rights, worker safety, and even the weekend. They continue to fight today for the vision of America articulated so eloquently by the President".
FRONTLINE: The Untouchables
FRONTLINE examines why no Wall St. execs have faced fraud charges for the financial crisis
Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
GOP has to rig elections to win
"Republicans in Virginia snuck an election rigging plan through the state Senate while everyone was focused on the inauguration. I'll tell you what they did - and more importantly why they did it - and how it speaks to the fundamental difference between Conservatives and Liberals." It's because republicans know they can't win, not on a national level. Republicans poll around 26% as a party, the Tea Party is at its lowest levels ever, and Americans continue to reject the ant-science, anti-education, anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-environment, pro-pollution, pro-plutocrat, racist platform. When the country does not agree with you on any major issue, all you have left is to cheat. Even top officials in the party have hinted that they fear they may not be able to win another national election for a long time.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery
JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ | nytimes.com
19 Jan 2013
19 Jan 2013
Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.
...
Our skyrocketing inequality — so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it” — means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty — the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece.
Smartphone shopping perils publishers | Newsosaur.com
snip
Here's why smartphone shopping matters: While local media in the un-wired age were the primary conduit for connecting sellers with potential buyers, the efficiency and immediacy of smartphone-assisted shopping has created an unprecedented opportunity for both on- and off-line retailers to build powerful, personalized and direct relationships with consumers. The stronger and more efficient those ties become, the less merchants will need to buy ads from such traditional intermediaries as newspapers, radio and television.
snip
Unless newspapers want to get shut out of their lucrative and long-standing partnership with the retail industry, the shift to smartphone shopping merits their full attention.
Unfortunately, publishers are so technologically out of touch that, according to the Newspaper Association of America, only 110 (8%) of the nation’s 1,382 dailies have gotten around to launching apps for the tablet, which happens to be the fastest-growing electronics product since electricity was discovered.
READ IT ALL:
Here's why smartphone shopping matters: While local media in the un-wired age were the primary conduit for connecting sellers with potential buyers, the efficiency and immediacy of smartphone-assisted shopping has created an unprecedented opportunity for both on- and off-line retailers to build powerful, personalized and direct relationships with consumers. The stronger and more efficient those ties become, the less merchants will need to buy ads from such traditional intermediaries as newspapers, radio and television.
snip
Unless newspapers want to get shut out of their lucrative and long-standing partnership with the retail industry, the shift to smartphone shopping merits their full attention.
Unfortunately, publishers are so technologically out of touch that, according to the Newspaper Association of America, only 110 (8%) of the nation’s 1,382 dailies have gotten around to launching apps for the tablet, which happens to be the fastest-growing electronics product since electricity was discovered.
READ IT ALL:
Friday, January 18, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Statement by Gov. Perry on President Obama’s Executive Actions
Rick Perry phones it in from Xanax-and-booze-land:
"There is evil prowling in the world - it shows up in our movies, video games and online fascinations, and finds its way into vulnerable hearts and minds. As a free people, let us choose what kind of people we will be. Laws, the only redoubt of secularism, will not suffice. Let us all return to our places of worship and pray for help. Above all, let us pray for our children.
"In fact, the piling on by the political left, and their cohorts in the media, to use the massacre of little children to advance a pre-existing political agenda that would not have saved those children, disgusts me, personally. The second amendment to the Constitution is a basic right of free people and cannot be nor will it be abridged by the executive power of this or any other president."
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Isolation of the American South
George Packer
21 Jan 2013
Every President elected between 1976 and 2004 was, by birth or by choice, a Southerner, except Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed a sort of honorary status. (When he began the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, scene of the murder, in 1964, of three civil-rights workers, many Southerners heard it as a dog whistle.) A Southern accent, once thought quaint or even backward, became an emblem of American authenticity, a political trump card. It was a truism that no Democrat could win the White House unless he spoke with a drawl.
Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reelect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.
Read it all:
21 Jan 2013
Every President elected between 1976 and 2004 was, by birth or by choice, a Southerner, except Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed a sort of honorary status. (When he began the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, scene of the murder, in 1964, of three civil-rights workers, many Southerners heard it as a dog whistle.) A Southern accent, once thought quaint or even backward, became an emblem of American authenticity, a political trump card. It was a truism that no Democrat could win the White House unless he spoke with a drawl.
Now the South is becoming isolated again. Every demographic and political trend that helped to reelect Barack Obama runs counter to the region’s self-definition: the emergence of a younger, more diverse, more secular electorate, with a libertarian bias on social issues and immigration; the decline of the exurban life style, following the housing bust; the class politics, anathema to pro-business Southerners, that rose with the recession; the end of America’s protracted wars, with cuts in military spending bound to come. The Solid South speaks less and less for America and more and more for itself alone.
Read it all:
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Paul Krugman on why jobs come first
January 11, 2013 | BillMoyers.com
The New York Times columnist explains why our top priority should be getting America back to work – if only Washington would stop throwing distractions in the way.
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Matt Taibbi: Secret and Lies of the Bailout
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it
created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence
scheme. And the worst may be yet to come.
-
Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
4 Jan 2013
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue...
...
...The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout…
…
…So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
THE WHOLE STORY
-
Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone
4 Jan 2013
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue...
...
...The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout…
…
…So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we're essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
THE WHOLE STORY
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