No one big thing, but many little things this morning.
EUROPE reminds me of that movie scene when the camera focuses on the gauge fluctuating wildly above the red line. With interest rates on various countries' debts moving to all time highs, it's only a matter of time before the special effects go full bore, and we see the explosions. When? How? Who? What next? Nobody knows.
UPDATE: A perusal of this morning's financial news shows that over-the-counter credit default swaps (exotic derivatives) increased by 18% from the first quarter to the second quarter this year, compared to a 3% increase from last year. This is the insurance that the banksters use to insulate themselves from the European contagion, but there are concerns that the CDS will not be sufficient in case of a panic.
The amount of funny money in play is $708 TRILLION. That's $708,000,000,000,000. Who will be the last person to hold the burning match? AIG? Or, more likely the Federal Reserve Board and Treasury?
THE SUPERCOMMITTEE is showing its real worth lately, which is zero. From the moment this platypus was conceived, its viability and relevance was about as much as a Kardashian wedding. Now that the Republicans are beginning to talk about the "smart options" of letting the automatic cuts take hold without any significant action, you can be sure that this mating of elephants will be lucky if it can conceive a pea.
And while we're on the subject of REPUBLICANS, you can smell the flop sweat of the tinfoil brigade when Newt Gingrich is ahead in the public opinion polls. Jokes about deer or comatose Republican Congressmen being in the lead for the nomination provide indicators that the Tea Party is in deep trouble. Not so slowly, it's losing its grasp on what little power it had left in DC.
HERMAN CAIN, specifically. There are a few things you probably may not know about Herman Cain. The more obvious one is that Herman is the fair-haired boy of the Koch brothers. But did you know that Cain's entire political juggernaut appears to have been financed by a 501(c3) non-profit organization?
In an alternative universe, this would be a federal felony with people going to jail. But in the current culture of DC, I suppose it's classified as business as usual.
PRESIDENT OBAMA is almost invisible lately. This is either a good sign -- ( he's actually thinking up something really big with a different direction in policy). Or it's really bad -- (he's withdrawn into his shell, wearing nothing but sweats, watching ESPN, and feeling sorry for himself).
Sometimes, its hard to tell the difference these days.
CHINA is where his mind has been. The American commitment to start up a major Navy base in Darwin, Australia is a significant shift in American policy. With Hillary Clinton in Manila (on a warship) talking about "helping allies to ensure that they are capable of deterring provocations"
We're talking about the Spratley and Paracel Islands, little unlivable rocks in the South China Sea where there's lots of OIL. Couple our more aggressive military presence in the area with Romney and the GOP's new fixation on China as the new enemy. Throw in the Chinese housing bubble with a massive change in leadership of the Politburo next year, and you've got one hot Chinese stir fry for 2012.
OLD NEW LEFTY'S ECONOMETRIC FORECAST. Yes, you can think that I'm not a reputable source because I post lewd things on Tinkerertink69's blog site on a regular basis. However, I was extremely gratified (?) to know that the San Francisco Federal Reserve Board's most recent econometric forecast of what lies ahead for 2012 is almost identical to what my model predicted.
For anyone who's an optimist, this is discouraging. SFFRB and I both say that 2012 will be a year of economic decline, and that shortly after the 2012 election, things will pop up quite positively -- and it won't be because Mitt Romney will be elected.
BAD NEWS, GOOD NEWS. The Supreme Court's decision to decide on whether Obamacare is constitutional or not may appear ominous, as Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, et. al. have decided to make the states rights issue a vital component in the ruling process. Conventional wisdom says that this dramatically increases the chances of the Supremes rejection of Obamacare due to the extreme conservative activism of the court. Obviously this would be seen as a massive failure for the Obama administration.
The good news in all of this is that such a ruling would go a long way towards validating the approach of actually providing a single payer, national health care system in the same way that just about every other civilized country in the world does right now.
OCCUPY WALL STREET is banging up against some cruel realities. Mass evictions will probably increase all across the country. Pundits will say that this is due to the power of conservative, business interests. I reply, that the USA in winter is not Cairo, Egypt. Even if OWS is forced to let the police and sanitation departments tear up their campgrounds, the movement will morph into something elsel
We are truly living in prerevolutionary times. Stay tuned.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
LEV JANASHVILI
Omnipotent Poobah
Donegal Descendant
Emily Holleman
MarianneSp
Reverend Billy Talen
Salon.com
Comments
If you look at the U-6 numbers, unemployment/subsistance employment is pushing 20%. Thus, one in 5 people who could work aren't. Couple this with the fact that 50% of those employed work for the fedearal, state or local government and you get a better idea of the trouble we are in.
Based on the number of private sector folks who are still employed, it will not be able to afford to pay more than half of those people who are currently getting a government paycheck. It's basic math.
Consider that most private sector human resource managers will not hire someone who has worked for the government more than a few years because their productivity is low and pay expectations are high and you can see yet another problem brewing.
Revolution? Yes............................soon.
“Couple this with the fact that 50% of those employed work for the fedearal, state or local government and you get a better idea of the trouble we are in.”
That percentage is false by a factor of seven, however great point about there not being enough employed people in the private sector to pay the outlandish salaries of those who are still employed in the public sector. And I never knew unemployed public sector employees were being black-balled by human resource professionals. If all I new about a prospective employee was that they came from the private or public sector, I would definitely choose the private sector worker. And allow me to alter Old New Lefty’s first item on the list:
Europe = The United States if we don’t find a way to control the deficit. No wonder Obama has finally (thankfully) buried his head in the sand.
The private sector cannot generate the tax revenue necessary to maintain this. Oops, almost forgot all those getting government retirement checks.
Good essay ONL...but there ain't gonna be an appreciable, sustained upturn in the economy after the election no matter who is elected.
Fact is, if we do not make major changes in the way we operate, the economy will continue on an ever accelerating downward spiral from this point on.
MAJOR FUCKIN' CHANGES!
(1) Republicans like Tom Coburn are starting to stand up to Grover Nordick
(2) Even Republicans are considering not re-upping the felonious tax cuts of Bush the Lesser
(3) Pat Robertson criticizes rightwing extremism
(4) rwnutjob corrects rightwing nutjob Johnny Fever and in the process admits govt actually does have a purpose
The sun will soon be setting on the right...............and the left.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
On a side note, I find it profoundly interesting after reading these comments that liberals seem to be rooting for the United States to fail economically. I’m at a loss for the reason behind this sentiment. But in the interest of educating me, is it perhaps because succeeding would be an admission that capitalism works? Or perhaps the people commenting on this site represent the extreme left, more sympathetic to anarchists?
Capitalism worked very well during America's Golden Age, from '49 to 73. Also known as New Deal America. The problem isn't capitalism, it's conservatism. Since 1981, America has been in a steady state of growing massive debt, credit expansion replacing real wealth and the destruction of our economic infrastructure. All due to extremely stupid conservative ideology.
We only need to rid ourselves of conservatism and let capitalism once again work like it's supposed to.
Economics aside, conservatism breeds stupidity in general, which is why the GOP primary race looks like a convention of sideshow geeks and why we get to read comments like yours.
On the other hand, I would have given just about anything to see positions of enlightened self interest govern the conservative movement and ruling class of this country instead of the unmitigated greed and defense of class privilege. If the 1% had even subscribed to the economic policies of Bill Clinton (which I dislike heartilty), this country would be in much better shape today.
As it is, my only job is to call 'em like I see 'em. And that's one reason why righties go to this blog as well as lefties.
What evidence do you have the country has been ruled by conservative ideology? If it was led by conservative ideology we wouldn’t have a Democratic president, abortion, an income tax, I could go on. And what evidence do you have that capitalism stopped working up until 1973 or 1981?
Perhaps it isn’t working very well now, but our growth rate was excellent for many years beyond those dates. And why else would so many countries, China being the most notable, embrace capitalism to break out of the economic malaise always prevalent with socialism?
Old New Lefty:
From 2008-2010 there has been a filibuster proof Democratic majority, meaning the Democrats could pretty much do whatever they pleased. If ever there was a time where one party could say to the other “we told you so” now is that time. How do you mitigate greed and class privilege without also destroying a basic tenet of capitalism?
By the way, the reason I go to liberal blog sites is to engage the other side and call attention to misrepresentations and false logic. Rwnutjob’s 50% statement caught my eye on this occasion, but Paul’s theory also doesn’t pass the sniff test.
By the way, I don't think that Greece can be legally forced out of using the Euro, though they may wish to leave on their own. For many years panama used the US dollar as its currency and it needed no legislation from the U.S.
You must have seen Cain's interview about Libya, that's the country where the rebels were trying to overthrow Qaddafi, right? Sheesh. Huntsman must be wondering what he has to do to get his 15 minutes.
And I'm afraid you might be right about 2012. My own job is no better than 50-50 in surviving the year.
It's disingenuous to say that because there was a two year period with Democratic control of Congress, that somehow, one session with a decidedly mixed bag of Democrats could somehow make up for the economic buggering of America by the Bush administration's tax cuts for the rich, financial deregulation, and deficit spending binge. And you might recall at that time there was a little health care issue.
As to our growth rates, the 80s and 90s had significant growth in the country, but a good part of that growth came through the introduction of computers. At the same time, the mantra of free trade threw American jobs out the window by the millions. The concept of the stay at home mom disappeared. People were forced to max out on their credit cards to maintain their lifestyle, and many were sucked into doing what the Bush administration had encouraged them to do by buying houses with subprime mortgages.
Your assertion that capitalism works is only half right. Economically, it is far more efficient at allocating overall goods and services when you have a market economy. But without government policies that wisely direct investment into productive areas like railroads, airlines, radio/TV, and the internet (all government backed ventures) in addition to things like education and infrastructure, we're left with the phenomenon of more and more for less and less -- less and less for more and more. And you can throw in things like government regulation of securities and financial companies and anti-trust laws on top of that.
Capitalism unbridled gave us the multiple panics, crashes, and depressions of the 19th Century, as well as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Re-regulation of capitalism gave us the longest and strongest period of prosperity in American history. And when we started dismantling that regulatory structure of government is when middle class income stagnation (and all of the other problems we're in today) started.
Any idea that OWS or other revolutionaries will destroy capitalism is ridiculous. Unbridled capitalism is doing an excellent job of destroying itself right now without any lefty help.
30 years of "conservative" economics. Actually neoliberalism, easier stated as libertarian, but it rode in with Reagan and using the conservative label. It's not hard to spot on a chart of federal debt, which exploded with Reagan and became a fiscal massacre under Bush. How you extract abortion from economics is as much a mystery as anything you say.
The growth rate was to greatly fueled by credit expansion and debt, federal and private. Wages remained stagnant as wealth redistribution shifted profits upward, eventually destroying the consumer base. Stupid, faithless, dysfunctional capitalism.
The salient point is the New Deal conservatives criticize worked far, far better than what conservatism delivered. In other words, movement conservatism is a dysfunctional fraud. Republicans, as David Stockman and Bruce Bartlett correctly point out -- wrecked the American economy.
One of these days I'll explain conservatism to you so you'll understand what it means and have a sense of its history.
Your capitalism/socialism slogans-as-arguments are simplistic and not worthy.
That was a really pretty synopsis.
ONL,
Good post.
I'd like more details on that 501 of Cain's. Thanks.
I think the Republicans are realizing the damage the Tea Party has done. Their candidates are a group of idiots whom most of the country views with incredulous disgust. Let's hope when Occupy Wall Street morphs into something else, it does so with more intelligence than the Tea Party.
PJO quote: "The growth rate was too greatly fueled by credit expansion and debt, federal and private. Wages remained stagnant as wealth redistribution shifted profits upward, eventually destroying the consumer base. Stupid, faithless, dysfunctional capitalism."
Democrats have benefitted far more from wealth redistribution than Republicans. Check the political affiliations of the wealthiest Americans and members of congress.
The Community Reinvestment Act which allowed home loans to any mud race that could fog a mirror contributed to credit expansion and directly led to the mess we are currently in. The CRA was a Democrat baby. Paul, it is disingenuous to ignore your parties scumbag role in our destruction.
Assume for a moment I agree with you guys; something wrong has been taking place for the past 30 years. Why do you insist it’s the fault of conservatives/capitalism? Liberals have shared power almost equally for the past 30 years. But I admit, at the end of the day, we are a capitalist country despite the fact we, with alarmingly frequency, elect liberal politicians. It’s amazing the economy has grown despite our inability to embrace conservatives/capitalism at the polling booths.
For you to be right in your assertions about capitalism, capitalism must be a recipe for failure. That is why you come up with qualifying statements like crediting our growth to computers. In the previous 30 year period do you credit the internal combustion engine? And that is why you continue to ignore anything I may say about capitalism being embraced throughout the world.
I guess the only way to get through to you is to focus on one of your statistical assertions, prove that to be false, and then maybe you’ll see the light.
“the mantra of free trade threw American jobs out the window by the millions.”
If that were true why does the chart below clearly show employment rising over time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms
Look, you’ve made plenty of false statistical assertions, but why do we have to go down that path? China has brought millions of its people out of poverty because they finally abandoned socialism. Would you like more examples of socialist countries experiencing an economic boom thanks to embracing the free market/capitalism?
The Community Reinvestment Act had zero, zilch, nada to do with the housing bubble and crash. It's comical to suggest it did, but comical describes most...no, pretty much all of what passes for conservative intellect nowadays.
Of the top 25 subprime lenders, only one qualified as a community bank, none had loans underwritten by FanFred (to defeat that line of BS) and the CRA never, at all, not once, forced banks to make bad loans. To suggest the CRA took a few decades to finally blow up the economy is silly and ignorant of reality--which is what "conservative" media is all about.
The problem is bipartisan, as plenty of Democrats joined in the neoliberal vampire blood-sucking, but that doesn't change the fact it was and is a product of the Reagan/Conservative/right-libertarian revolution/devolution.
The worst of the destruction came with President Cheney and the total Republican takeover of Congress. More debt financed tax cuts, unpaid wars and unpaid Medicare part D treasury draining for Big Pharm. The act that made the housing crash inevitable was a simple SEC abandonment of capital requirements for the Big 5 investment banks. That was 2004, not 1979.
I'd be no less or more impressed by a dead-head Soviet commie die hard as a brainwashed conservative clown. The only difference is the conservative clowns made for a far more impressive national economic collapse. Movement conservatism is a joke.
You keep framing what I say as some sort of anti-capitalist thing. I have pointed out, many times, I'm a better capitalist than you. If you ever wonder why I think you're ridiculous, there's one reason.
China didn't have to work hard to accomplish State Capitalism, which isn't the sort of free market capitalism you seem to think it is. China was simply given the capital and equipment that Americans worked for decades to establish. That you cite that as some sort of "proof" in your response to assertions that nobody is making just adds another level of insipid to your resume'.
Fever, you simply aren't informed or smart enough to engage in conversations that go beyond the useless regurgitation of trite slogans and quasi-Bolshevik brainwashed prattle. It's evident you think you're intelligent, but you can't argue intelligently. That you don't notice the truth of that reconfirms its reality.
Take off your shoe, open wide, now insert it in your mouth. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was not limited to community banks as you contend. It applied to all banks that receive FDIC insurance, not just community banks.
More importantly, I know this may be a bitter pill to swallow, but there is ample evidence housing collapse was far worse in low income areas and foreclosures were far more prevalent amongst low-income borrowers. These same areas and borrowers were the direct beneficiaries of the mandates imposed by the CRA. I do agree; the CRA is not the only reason for the collapse. Would you like me to name the other Government policies that helped to cause the crisis or would you rather stick to blaming Republicans and Wall Street?
When I had the opportunity to visit China back in '87 it was basically a polluted third world crap hole. Today, parts of it have made it into the first world, but only through graft, corruption and shoddy workmanship..............the many Chinese peasants serve the few Chinese elitists. Hmmmmm, sounds kind of like Wal-Mart employees.
Communism and socialism, as practiced did not work. With the level of selfishness and scumbaggery we see in the U.S. today, capitalism is not working. We need something else.
I'll grace you with a response, but your ignorance is profound and your comments a waste of time.
The CRA only applies to commercial banks and S&Ls. Those banks take savings deposits. Those deposits are FDIC insured. To what you think is a rebuttal -- like DUH and a smug "hilarious."
The CRA does not apply to private mortgage lenders or investment banks. The loans that crashed were unregulated and were issued by non-CRA qualifying, non-FDIC covered entities. The post Glass-Steagall problem was allowing investment banks the functions of a commercial bank, in this case issuing mortgages. The Top 25 Subprime lenders were private mortgage companies either owned by or that had purchase agreements with investment banks.
Having more foreclosures in low income, low education areas is no surprise, but obviously it had nothing to do with the CRA. Those people were targeted for toxic loans because those who issued the loans didn't care if they didn't perform and the customers were unsophisticated. This is the same reason you're a target, as your laughably inadequate post hoc displays are a product of low intelligence. I'm not just saying that to ridicule, as it's a provable fact also.
If you would take time to read the CRA, you'd find it has a very gauzy objective, as there are no firm quotas or any requirement to make bad loans. Also feeding your spoon fed ignorance is the difference between subprime loans, which have existed for a few decades, and toxic subprime garbage, which are product of G-S repeal, SEC capital requirement abandonment and lack of regulatory oversight.
Fevie, you're plainly incapable of intelligent argument and you're tragically uninformed. You can't tell the difference between a logical connection and a illogical stumble. Here, that CRA issued low income loans and low income loans had high default means the CRA is responsible. A child of 2 with only one working eye and a very thick monocle it can't find could see there's no logical, proven connection. When reality is examined, there's no proven connection anyway.
When I tell you you're benighted, it doesn't mean the Queen tapped you with a sword.
You're not even close to being near to being a challenge, and I've gotten enough laughs from your base attempts at argument.
Put up a post and let those who will treat you seriously find you. We'll consider it a kind of OS IQ test.
It isn't Putin, it's Medvedev and he isn't a Dead-Head, he's a Deep Purple Fan.
With a conservative ideology, you'd still have an income tax -- or we'd experience the joy of being Greece. Someone has to fund the stupid wars. You'd still have abortion. Maybe it would be illegal abortion and the death rate for women would be higher, but you'd have it. And if the country passed a embryo-is-a-person act and outlawed birth control, the abortion rate would skyrocket.