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thinkahol *

The Deficit Chart Republicans Hate | Mother Jones - 0 views

motherjones.com/...deficit-chart-republicans-hate

The Deficit Chart Republicans Hate | Mother Jones

shared by thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11
     
    I get a little bored repeating over and over that our short-term deficit is almost entirely not Barack Obama's fault. It's mostly the fault of the Bush tax cuts, the Bush wars, and the financial collapse that happened during the Bush presidency. At this point, though, this is more in the nature of a religious debate than a factual one, and conservatives are going to keep repeating the same tired disinformation about the deficit regardless of any evidence one way or the other. Still, just on the off chance that a few people are still persuadable on this, it's nice of CBPP to update its chart showing the source of the deficit over the next decade. (Farther out than that, Medicare is largely responsible for most deficit projections.) As you can see, by 2013 or so, virtually the entire deficit is due to Bush-era policies/disasters. So cut this out and post it on your refrigerator.
thinkahol *

BBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: "The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The World" - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

BBC Speechless As Trader Tells Truth: The Collapse Is Coming...And Goldman Rules The World - YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 28 Sep 11
     
    BBC News-Sept. 26, 2011- http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/cutline/bbc-victim-hoax-no-yes-men-154724196.html Just listen to this guy. Thanks to zerohedge for posting this story.
thinkahol *

Photographing the Great Depression, Then and Now - 0 views

readersupportednews.org/...-great-depression-then-and-now

Photographing the Great Depression Then and Now

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Sep 11
     
    Faces from the Great Crash of 1929 and its aftermath are haunting the 21st century. Wall Street brokers fleeing the trading floor in panic, or putting their cars on sale because they are suddenly broke, appear in old black-and-white photographs beside analyses of the current state of the markets composed by sombre authorities. Not only the collapse of confidence that shattered investors 82 years ago but the long years of misery that followed now seem to call out to us, to warn us, to show us a truth that is urgent and immediate. Can this really be so? Can that nightmare history be repeating itself?
thinkahol *

Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President | Common Dreams - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...04-4

Ralph Nader Is Tired of Running for President | Common Dreams

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Jul 11
     
    The most important moral and intellectual voices within a disintegrating society are slowly discredited when their nonviolent protests and calls for justice cannot alter intransigent and corrupt systems of power. The repeated acts of peaceful civil disobedience, efforts at electoral and political reform and the fight to protect the rule of law are dismissed as useless by an embittered, dispossessed and betrayed public. The demagogues and hatemongers, the purveyors of violence, easily seduce enraged and bewildered masses in the final stages of collapse with false promises of vengeance, new glory and moral renewal. And in the spiral downward the good among us are reviled as naive and ineffectual fools.
thinkahol *

Robert Scheer: Bill Clinton's Legacy of Denial - Robert Scheer's Columns - Truthdig - 0 views

www.truthdig.com/...linton_in_deep_denial_20110621

Robert Scheer: Bill Clinton's Legacy of Denial - Scheer's Columns Truthdig

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Jun 11
     
    Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that's the case, or he wouldn't have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president. 
thinkahol *

Study shows that one 'super-corporation' pulls the strings of the global economy | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...ls-strings-global-economy.html

Study shows that one 'super-corporation' pulls the strings of global economy | Mail Online

shared by thinkahol * on 20 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Oct 11
     
    A University of Zurich study 'proves' that a small group of companies - mainly banks - wields huge power over the global economy. The study is the first to look at all 43,060 transnational corporations and the web of ownership between them - and created a 'map' of 1,318 companies at the heart of the global economy. The study found that 147 companies formed a 'super entity' within this, controlling 40 per cent of its  wealth. All own part or all of one another. Most are banks - the top 20 includes Barclays and Goldman Sachs. But the close connections mean that the network could be vulnerable to collapse
thinkahol *

YouTube - Conversations with History: Elizabeth Warren - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Conversations with History: Elizabeth Warren economics collapse american middle class

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Aug 10
     
    Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren for a discussion of the economic pressures confronting the two income middle class family as it struggles to pay mortgages, health care, and education costs. Professor Warren offers surprising answers to "Who goes bankrupt and why?" and explores the role of banks and credit card companies in tightening the squeeze on the average American family. The interface between politics and the law in addressing these problems is explored. Series: "Conversations with History" [5/2007] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 12490]
thinkahol *

In defense of Alan Simpson - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

greenwald glenn in defense of alan simpson

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10 - Cached
  • One of the most significant developments in the U.S. is the rapidly and severely increasing rich-poor gap.  A middle class standard of living is being suffocated and even slowly eliminated, as budget cuts cause an elimination of services that are hallmarks of first-world living.  Because the wealthiest Americans continue to consolidate both their monopoly on wealth and, more important, their control of Congress and the government generally, we respond to all of this by enacting even more policies which exacerbate that gap and favor even more the wealthiest factions while taking more from the poorest and most powerless.  And now, the very people responsible for the vulernable financial state of the U.S. want to address that problem by targeting one of the very few guarantors in American life of a humane standard of living:  Social Security.
  • thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10
     
    He deserves gratitude for his candor about the goals of Obama's Deficit Commission and Social Security
Levy Rivers

FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right: Post-Debate Thoughts, or Lack Thereof - 0 views

www.fivethirtyeight.com/...-thoughts-or-lack-thereof.html

debate 2 mccain obama reputation

shared by Levy Rivers on 08 Oct 08 - No Cached
  • McCain needed to keep the Republican brand at arm's-length. He had largely managed to do that until the Lehman Brothers collapse scared the Hell out of Main Street and reminded everyone of the failures of the status quo. McCain needed to empathize on the economy; his "fundamentals" comment made that very difficult. He needed to find some way to position himself in opposition to Senator Obama on the bailout, but he had boxed himself in with his gambit about suspending his campaign. McCain lost tonight, but the reasons for his failure stem from long before this evening.
  • What was with McCain's failure to shake Obama's hand after the debate? It was quite awkward although I appreciate Barack Obama not breaking step through it
Sarah Eeee

Income Inequality and the 'Superstar Effect' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26excerpt.html

inequality capitalism economics

shared by Sarah Eeee on 27 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try.
  • It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
  • The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation. The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
  • Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits. Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
  • Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
  • Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy. Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking
  • Sarah Eeee on 27 Dec 10
     
    (Part 2 of 2 - see first part below) What impact do the incredible salaries of superstars have on the rest of us? What has changed, technologically and socially, to precipitate these inequities? This article also offers a brief look at the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, comparing the US throughout its history and the US vis a vis several European countries.
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

www.michaelparenti.org/capitalism%20apocalypse.html

politics economy capitalism

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  •  The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.
  • Some eighty  years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
  • In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.
  • About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses.
  • Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside  the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.”
  • Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.
  • Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.
  • In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.
  • To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing  some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.
  • There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself.  Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace. 
  • Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.
  • These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.
  • Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.
  • The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it.  In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint.
  • Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them.  The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.
  • Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.
  • But the 2008-09 “rescue operation” offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve.  Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.
  • In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen.
  • If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.
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