This is a classic "small d" democratic moment. The economy is in deep trouble -- immediate and long term. Washington is oblivious, compromised by moneyed interests, knotted by ideological divides. It will take an angry and aroused citizens' movement to demand the debate worthy of a great nation in deep trouble. The dismal jobs numbers only punctuate the reality of an economy that isn't producing sufficient jobs. The crisis is both immediate and long-term. The so-called recovery hasn't begun to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession. 25 million people are in need of full time work. Home values continue to fall. 25 percent of 17- to 25-year-old high school graduates not in college are out of work. Much of a generation is at risk. The immediate is only an expression of more profound problems. The middle class was losing ground before the Great Recession. Good jobs are being shipped abroad. Wages aren't keeping up with the costs of basics. The broad middle class that made America exceptional is disappearing. The American dream seems ever more like a nostalgic memory. The nation continues to run unsustainable trade deficits, and must dig out of a mountain of debt -- both public and private. For the first time, an increasing majority of Americans fear their kids won't fare as well as they have. We need action to put people to work. But short term fixes aren't enough. Americans are looking for a serious strategy that will get us out of the mess we are in. The Beltway Bloviating But inside the beltway, Washington is clueless. It's the only major city in the country where housing prices are going up. A flood of corporate lobby money insures that the tables are full at the high end restaurants. Entrenched corporate interests buy a lot more than lunches with their dough. They block vital reforms on health care, energy, trade, Wall Street. They feed off taxpayers, protecting their subsidies and tax dodges, avoiding taxes, while deficits rise and essential programs like nutrition for infants get cut. The politicians prefer posturing to bold action, "message" and "spin" to leadership. Republicans even with the majority in the House are focused on obstruction. They vote for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, paid for by ending Medicare and Medicaid, hiking costs for those least able to pay -- seniors, the disabled, the dying. They vow to blow up the economy if they can't get a deal on trillions in domestic spending cuts, accompanied by more tax breaks for the wealthy. They're lining their campaign coffers carrying water for the big banks against even minimal reforms. The adult Republican presidential candidates like Mitch Romney claim they can get the economy going and create jobs. But they only recycle old and failed nostrums. More tax cuts for corporations who are already sitting on over a trillion in cash waiting for customers. More tax cuts for the wealthiest, who already have the most concentrated income and wealth since the eve of the Great Depression. More corporate trade deals that ship goods jobs abroad, undermine wages at home, and force up to borrow over a billion a day from abroad to balance the deficits. Less regulation when we haven't recovered from the catastrophe caused by the excesses of deregulated Wall Street. They pretend they can balance the budget and put people to work by cutting domestic spending, cutting taxes, increasing spending on the military, and not dismantling basic promises like Medicare and Social Security. They and everyone else knows that is a lie. The White House offers no clear way out. The president wants to hail the successes of an economy that isn't working for most people. Yes, his policies saved us from free fall -- thanks, but we're worried about what we face, not where we've been. He sensibly calls for "winning the future" -- making investments in areas like education, innovation and infrastructure. But he's locked himself into austerity, focused on cuts, and offering no big vision of how we move forward. He's more sensible than the tea party zealots, but remains unwilling to tell Americans what needs to be done and that fight for it. The Democrats in the Senate are a babble, too divided to deliver a message. The House Democrats are cowed by the losses in 2010, too worried about being accused of being "big spenders" to lay out a course to get the economy going and put people to work. And few seem ready to put out a strategy that necessarily will take on the interests that are strangling the dream. A national trade strategy that isn't controlled by multinationals. Affordable health care not catering to private insurance and drug companies. Fair taxes that shut down the tax havens, the dodges, the obscene subsidies that drain our resources. An investment strategy that generates vital public and private investment, not more Wall Street speculation, or CEO incentives for laying off workers and plundering their own companies. It will take a popular uprising to get Washington even to begin to focus seriously on jobs and the economy. We've seen this before. There was a bipartisan consensus on the Iraq War until a growing movement forced first Democrats and then the Bush White House to face reality. The Washington establishment was drunk on slashing Social Security and Medicare to address deficits, and Republicans embraced gutting Medicare, until popular disapproval expressed both in the polls and in the special election in upstate New York sobered them up a bit. The anger expressed by the Tea Party minority still has Republicans in Washington reeling. Now we need the people to speak again. This time for the American majority. We aren't buying the old conservative elixirs. The New Dem-Republican lite embrace of half measures and conservative cross dressing isn't acceptable. Washington has to hear a clear message. We elected you to get this economy going, not gut Medicare. We want to know how you will create jobs. We don't want to be served the old tired babble. We know we can't simply cut our way to prosperity. We know we need a major change in our global strategy. We know we've got to make investments vital to the future -- in education and in innovation. We know this economy needs major reforms. Anyone not willing to challenge the corporate interests that are strangling change isn't serious. We know it is hard to focus on creating jobs when deficits are this high. We know we'll have to sacrifice, but we're not broke -- we don't have to break promises to our kids or our parents. And don't ask the victims of this economy to sacrifice when those making out like bandits are given a pass. We know once the economy is moving, taxes have to go up and spending has to be brought under control. So stop the nonsense of no tax hikes. Tell us what you will cut and why. Don't pretend choices don't have to be made. So lay it out. How do you put people to work, change our economic strategy so we begin once more to make things in America and create good jobs, not poverty wage jobs? How does that relate to getting our books in order and our priorities straight? Give us a debate worthy of a great nation in deep trouble. In August, after Washington reaches an inevitable deal on lifting the debt limit after weeks of posturing and bluster, of an idiotic debate focused on what to cut rather than how to get the economy going, legislators will return home for recess. They need to hear from us. Congress and the White House are now focused on how we deal with our huge deficit - a crisis brought about over the last 10 years by two wars, tax breaks for the rich, the Wall Street bailout and a prescription drug program - all unpaid for. The deficit also increased as a result of the declining tax revenues during a current recession, caused by the greed and illegal behavior of Wall Street. While the middle class is in rapid decline and poverty is increasing, the wealthiest people in our country are doing phenomen... The commonly-accepted unemployment figures for the Great Depression are overstated. Specifically, government workers were counted as unemployed even though gainfully employed and receiving a pay check. If we're trying to compare current unemployment figures with the Great Depression, the calculations of economists such as Michael Darby are more accurate. Current levels of unemployment are Depression-level numbers, especially when compared to Darby's figures. For example, economist John Williams puts current U-6 unem... The country has been plundered to throw money at the big banks to allow their CEOs to rake in bonuses by playing an extend-and-pretend game (pretending they are solvent). This has driven us from the "wealth of nations" to the "debt of nations". The government has been guaranteeing that the big banks make money at taxpayer expense by loaning money at very low interest rates, and then letting the banks loan the money back to the government at much higher interest rates. Tags: Federa... Very quietly the Treasury released its latest refunding announcement, in which it disclosed it would issue another $66 billion. What is happening is that retirement accounts are now being seriously plundered, and if the unthinkable were to happen, and the debt ceiling would not rise, not only would the US be in technical default, but various retirement funds, which already are underfunded, would find themselves even more severely in the Red. As the chart below shows, the total amount of intragovernmental debt curre... Congress is under pressure to cut the rapidly rising costs of the federal government’s food stamps program at a time when a record number of Americans are relying on it. More than 44.5 million Americans received SNAP benefits in March, an 11 percent increase from one year ago and nearly 61 percent higher than the same time four years ago. Nearly 21 million households are reliant on food stamps. Opponents of the program argue that money from the food stamps budget -- with what they call its increasingly lax requireme... E. coli that has sickened thousands in Europe has become the deadliest outbreak of the bacteria on record as a rare strain is causing kidney failure in unprecedented numbers, US health officials said. At least 18 people have died and 1,823 cases have been reported. The number of reported cases is based on hospital records, and the actual number of infections may be 10 or more times higher. The strain circulating in Germany and nine other European countries produces a toxin not usually seen in E. coli that can damage... Seymour Hersh has a new article arguing that there is no credible evidence that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons; to the contrary, he writes, "the US could be in danger of repeating a mistake similar to the one made with Saddam Hussein's Iraq eight years ago -- allowing anxieties about the policies of a tyrannical regime to distort our estimates of the state's military capacities and intentions." This of course conflicts with one of the pillar-orthodoxies of Obama foreign policy in the Middle East (even though the ... The state security apparatus which came into being during the Bush administration is now supported just as strongly, if not more so, under Obama. The justice department recently asserted that it can withhold classified information from a federal judge. Federal judges have security clearances and are permitted to see classified information in cases brought before them. The Obama justice department says that only the executive branch has the power to determine what information courts ought to have. The government atto... The deadliest US tornado season in 75 years has ripped babies from their mother's arms and transformed entire towns into apocalyptic scenes of destruction as the toll hit 523. And it isn't over yet. While warmer summer weather should hopefully reduce their intensity, the peak tornado season runs through July and twisters can strike at any time. The damage is as unimaginable as it is unpredictable. Funnel clouds drop out of a darkened sky, tossing cars and mobile homes up into the air, pulling huge trees out of the ... Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh was wounded in an attack on his palace in the capital, Sanaa, in which the prime minister and speaker of parliament were injured and four guards killed. A security official confirmed to AFP that Saleh was injured in the attack, but alive, following a report by an opposition TV station that he was dead. The speaker of parliament was in critical condition. Dissident tribesmen loyal to Sheikh Sadiq al Ahmar have clashed violently with Saleh's forces for days in and around Sanaa, with... In the US, that Too Stupid to Stop mantra can be extended to include appointed officials, like Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (still not admitting our record debt increase came directly from the $4 trillion worth of Treasury issuance and other forms of assistance extended to our banking system since late 2008) and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (ditto). The better plan would be to disband the Too Stupid to Stop mentality. Screw the banks. Sadly, it's a self-fullfilling downward spiral of incompetence - in Greece, Irelan... Democracy Now: A prominent Wall Street analyst predicted this week that not a single top executive at Goldman Sachs will face criminal prosecution for the company’s role in causing the financial meltdown of 2008. “I think there is a genuine sense out there that there are two sets of rules: One for big and powerful institutions that are deemed to be too powerful to fail, and the rest of us, Main Street,” says our guest Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson and Joshua Rosner are co-authors of the new book, “Reckless Endangerm... The deadly tornadoes and widespread flooding that have left a trail of death and destruction throughout the South and the Midwest have also disrupted dozens of local economies. A new phase is slowly beginning in some hard-hit areas: reconstruction, which past disasters show is typically accompanied by a burst of new economic activity. There is no silver lining to a funnel cloud, as anyone who survived the tornadoes can attest, but reconstruction can help rebuild local economies as well as neighborhoods. Home Depot b... Banker Derangement Syndrome (BDS) occurs when someone who might once have been sensible is acting as a mindless mouthpieces of particularly rancid banking industry propaganda. BDS occurs when an independent party says something so blatantly and embarrassingly wrong in support of the banking industry, whether to curry favor or via having taken an overdose of its Kool Aid, so as to do severe damage to their credibility. An over-zealous effort to win points with our new financial overlords, it backfired big time. The i... The Federal government borrowed and spent $5.1 trillion over the past four years to generate a cumulative $700 billion increase in the nation's GDP. That means we've borrowed and spent $7.28 for every $1 of nominal "growth" in GDP. We got no growth at all for our $5.1 trillion: zip, zero, nada. If you borrowed $7 to get $1 in your pocket, would that strike you as a good deal? How long do you reckon you could borrow $7 to get $1 of "growth" in your finances? Here are the numbers, drawn from these sources: U.S. GDP b... From harassment to arrest warrants to fake Facebook profiles, debt collection agencies are going to ridiculous lengths to track down repayment. The debt collection industry made $11.7 billion in revenue last year. Complaints about collectors account for 27% of those lodged with the FTC. These companies buy up bad debt from lenders for cheap and then hunt down the money owed in order to turn a profit. And in doing so, some act more like organized crime than private businesses. They harass consumers with threats and o... One chart stands out: the comparison of yesterday's surprisingly weak Consumer Confidence number with comparable prints taken at financial crises and tragedies of the past such as the October 1987 markets crash, Desert Storm, LTCM, the dot com collapse, September 11, Katrina, and Lehman. Consumer confidence two years into the "recovery" is lower than during any other previous economic "expansion," even as congress is about to unleash the most brutal wave of fiscal consolidation (aka austerity) in recent American his... A 19-member international panel has condemned the US-led "War on Drugs" campaign as a failure and has recommended major reforms of the global drug prohibition regime. The Global Commission on Drug Policy report argues that the four-decades-long campaign has failed to make significant changes in the international drug scenario and has, in fact, devastating consequences on human societies across the world. "Overwhelming evidence now demonstrates the human and social benefits both of treating drug addiction as a health... Whistle-blowers, truth-tellers and fraud-spotters pay a miserable price on Wall Street. They are vilified. They are fired. Sometimes they are even sued. Instead of being sought after, they become persona non grata. Recently, I caught up with David Maris, a one-time star pharmaceutical analyst for Bank of America. His story encapsulates just how broken Wall Street culture is. Mr. Maris put out a sell report on Biovail, a Canadian drug company. He fixed on the company's bizarre explanation of why it had missed its ear... Peter Yastrow told CNBC that "We’re on the verge of a great, great depression. The [Federal Reserve] knows it." But this is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. Indeed, top economists such as Anna Schwartz, James Galbraith, Nouriel Roubini and others have pointed out that while banks faced a liquidity crisis during the Great Depression, today they are wholly insolvent. The housing slump is worse than during the Great Depression. States and cities are in dire financial straits, and many may default in 20... |
Friday, June 3, 2011
Posted by ed. dickau at 4:08 PM