Archive for category Capitalism
Fox “news” is inspiringly stupid!
Posted by Larry Bergan in 4th Estate (Media), Capitalism, Disaster, Fox Lies, Hypocrisy, Mental health, People Are Nuts, This Blog on August 24, 2010
LATWTTGALI, (laughing all the way to the grave and loving it.)
Watch this:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| The Parent Company Trap | ||||
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The Decline: The Geography of a Recession
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bush Failures, Capitalism, Disaster, Economy, National Politics, Unemployment on August 17, 2010
Geographers love maps. Maps are one of the best forms of communication ever devised. But sometimes maps can be very, very frightening…
Multi-temporal map animation by LaToya Egwuekwe
According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 31 million people currently unemployed — that’s including those involuntarily working part time and those who want a job, but have given up on trying to find one. In the face of the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, millions of Americans are hurting. “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,” as created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe, serves as a vivid representation of just how much. Watch the deteriorating transformation of the U.S. economy from January 2007 — approximately one year before the start of the recession — to the most recent unemployment data available today.
Note: This map displays the so-called U3 unemployment statistic, which doesn’t account for the underemployed and those who’ve simply given up looking for work. The real measure of unemployment is approximately double the U3 numbers.
h/t HuffPo
UPDATE: Glenn Beck’s advice to his unemployed fellow Americans: “Go out and get a job.” (Beck’s job pays $25 million a year — nice work if you can get it. No college degree required, either.)
UPDATE: Death and Joblessness: Suicide Dogs the Long-Term Unemployed. What Can Be Done to Help Them?
UPDATE: Initial Jobless Claims the Latest Indicator in Support of a Double Dip
Initial Jobless Claims for the week ending August 14th came in at a seasonally adjusted 500,000, the highest level since November 2009.
…That begs the question of whether the NBER’s reluctance to call an official end to the great recession means that the NBER thinks it never really ended.
After “The Greatest Generation” Came “The Pepsi Generation”
Posted by Larry Bergan in 4th Estate (Media), Activist groups, American People, Capitalism, Election Fraud, Peace, Socialism on August 8, 2010
Somebody by the name of Bernard Weiner just wrote an article for “Online Journal” which I think gives a close to perfect snapshot of where we find ourselves today and how we got here. It’s about the methods corporate America uses to stamp out any threat to it’s domination of our culture. Any movement attempting to bring any new ideas or true innovations towards making our future better is sequestered and redefined to bolster capitalism. Even election fraud is on the table in this race for eminence.
I’m not going to reprint any portion of the article here because I think the entire article is a must read!
Thanks for finding this, cav.
Social Security Isn’t At Risk Except From the People Trying to Destroy It!
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Capitalism, Democrats, Economic Exploitation, Federal Budget, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, congress on August 2, 2010
StrengthenSocialSecurity.org – Sign the petition.
Social Security is the only defined-benefit retirement plan available to most Americans. My generation paid double payroll taxes so that we could fund the retirement of the generation ahead of us, and build up the trust fund for our own retirement.
On December 1, President Obama’s secretive Catfood Commission is going to recommend cuts to Social Security in the name of deficit reduction.
Dr. Irwin Kellner, MarketWatch:
Here is the bottom line right up front: the Social Security system will remain solvent far longer than is generally expected, so there is no need to tinker with it.
…Since 1983, revenues from payroll taxes have exceeded benefits paid to retirees. In 2003, income totaled $632 billion while benefits paid were $471 billion. Assets held in special issue U.S. Treasury securities totaled $2.5 trillion (the trust fund), with this amount expected to grow significantly over the next dozen or so years.
Ten years ago, the system’s actuaries thought the trust fund would be depleted by 2029. Five years ago they thought it would be 2032. Now the date when the surplus is expected to be gone is 2042 — and the Congressional Budget Office thinks it could be 2052.
The reason for these changing projections? More money coming in than previously expected.
This alone should signal policymakers that major surgery may not be needed. But when you look at the assumptions underlying these projections, you have to be even more cautious.
The system’s actuaries actually produce three long-range projections. The one that’s been picked by the politicians, pundits and the press and turned into the conventional wisdom is their intermediate projection — the one that expects the trust fund to be depleted by 2042.
But the assumptions underlying these projections are very pessimistic — especially when it comes to economic growth.
The actuaries assume that the U.S. economy will grow by an annual rate of 1.9 percent per year over the next 75 years. This is far below the 3.6 percent average of the past 75 years — a period that includes the Great Depression.
The system’s actuaries have a somewhat more optimistic projection. It assumes, among other things, a slightly faster rate of growth of 2.7 percent per year over the same period.
While this, too, is below the economy’s 75-year average, it shows that the system never runs out of money. That’s right, never.
So before they start fixing the Social Security system, policymakers should first understand that it’s not broken to begin with.
UPDATE: The Social Security Trust Fund is $2.5 trillion, not $1.5 trillion as originally stated above.
UPDATE: James K. Galbraith has a good idea– let’s expand Social Security and Medicare to save the economy:
There are many older workers who’ve already worked hard jobs for many years. They would love to retire. But they don’t, because early retirement on Social Security is very costly: you lose benefits every month over your entire future life, unless you hang on to the regular retirement age. We should give these people a break, and lower, not raise, the full-benefit Social Security retirement age—say, to 62 for the next three years. This would give millions a chance to get out, if they want to.
…Encouraging early retirements would mean that young people—just out of school, with fresh skills, good health, and high energy—would get the jobs they need now. They would not be stuck waiting, or spinning their wheels in school, for years and years.
UPDATE: Via HuffPo:
Social Security, according to its annual report (PDF), is expected to pay out slightly more in benefits than it receives in payroll tax this year, for the first time since changes were made in 1983. But payroll taxes are only one source of income for the program, and with the others — including interest income on its $2.5 trillion trust fund, held in special issue U.S. Treasury securities — the program is expected to continue to run a surplus until 2024.
Milton Friedman’s $8 Trillion Dollar Mistake
Posted by Glenden Brown in Capitalism, Conservative, Deficit, Economic Exploitation, Economy on August 2, 2010
In a lengthy and interesting op-ed, former Reaganite David Stockman covered a lot of ground, but one passage in particular jumped out at me:
The first of these [great deformations of the national economy] started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.
It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.
It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman’s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.
There’s something epic and mindboggling about those paragraphs. Friedman has been a leading preacher for the doctrine of “free markets fix everything” for decades. Stockman accuses him of misjudgment on a scale so massive it beggars the imagination.
Comcast Forced Transition to Digital
Posted by Richard Warnick in 4th Estate (Media), Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Entertainment, This Blog, utah on July 31, 2010
Yup, Comcast turned my TV set into a clock
I’m in the middle of the Comcast forced transition to digital cable, which the Salt Lake Tribune’s Vince Horiuchi recently described as “free and painless.” The changeover requires the installation of a digital box for every TV set.
Comcast didn’t charge for the boxes, but the transition isn’t “free.” I had to spend time installing the boxes and getting them activated by Comcast. How do we know our cable bill won’t go up now that we have the “benefit” of digital cable? The universal TV remote controls we bought are now useless for changing channels. And the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) fingers the digital boxes as notorious energy hogs. The giveaway is the extraordinary amount of heat these boxes put out. “In general, if you feel heat, energy is being wasted,” says Noah Horowitz, a senior scientist at NRDC.
Forcing customers to use these boxes isn’t enough to make Comcast the worst company in America. They really work at it. Two weeks ago, we experienced a day-long unexplained cable outage that left us with no TV and no Internet access. When I called Comcast, their voice mail system directed me to a recorded message saying “your area is experiencing a service interruption.” Which I knew already. Before that, they started bugging us about the digital changeover by mail and phone. Then they started a scroll across the bottom of the TV screen every half hour. We finally ordered the boxes, they came, and I went through the installation process on Saturday. After I discovered it didn’t work (see below), here comes a Comcast salesman knocking on the door trying to sell us phone service. I told him that losing the TV and Internet was bad enough without having the phone cut off too!
As a result of installing the Comcast power-hogging box, I got instant access to pay-per-view that I didn’t want. And I lost most of the cable channels, including all the broadcast networks (see picture). On channel after channel, Comcast’s new service helpfully told me what was on– but instead of the usual picture and sound, there was an error message. Their phone tech support guy couldn’t solve it. Somebody’s coming on Monday to try and figure out the problem. Meanwhile, I unplugged the %@#&! box so I could watch Saturday-night reruns of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Again.
Sadly, Draper isn’t part of UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency), which is bringing fiber optic connections to the tech-starved masses. Needless to say, Comcast is doing everything they can think of to stop UTOPIA.
UPDATE: Vince Horiuchi has an update, with e-mails from people struggling with Comcast’s “new and evil box.”
Related One Utah posts:
Help! Comcast is Trying to Rob Me! (August 6th, 2008)
Comcast Weans the Poor Off Politics (July 2, 2008)
Bush’s ‘Ownership Society’ – Wiping Out the Middle Class
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bailout, Bush Administration, Capitalism, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, Poverty, This Blog, Unemployment on July 27, 2010
Yesterday I got my annual property tax assessment in the mail. When President Bush’s so-called “ownership society” collapsed, the value of the house I live in plunged 40 percent in one year. Now it has come back up a few thousand dollars to the market price from eight years ago.
The “ownership society” was a right-wing article of faith, but the hard reality is most Americans got owned. By the politicians, by the banks, by the corporations. I’m actually one of the lucky ones, because I don’t owe more on my house than it’s worth– and I still have a job.
From Michael Snyder, Business Insider:
22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America
- 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
- 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
- 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
- 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
- A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
- 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
- Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
- Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
- For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.
- As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
- The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
- Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
- In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
- The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
- In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
- More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
- For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
- This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
- Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
- Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
- The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.
What are the Republicans proposing now that the “ownership society” has been exposed as a fraud? They want to raise taxes on what’s left of the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and more corporate tax cuts.
UPDATE: On Walking Away: Is Strategic Default All That’s Left to Stressed Homeowners?
Reverend Moonie’s Job is Done!
Posted by Larry Bergan in 4th Estate (Media), Capitalism, Chris Cannon, Conservative, Conservative Sell-Outs, Corruption, Election Fraud, Free Speech, Liars (politics), National Politics, Religion, This Blog, Voting Rights, censorship on May 18, 2010
I’m not sure what that job was.
Was it to make lots of money or simply destroy the United States? Was it to make fools of the US citizens and the congress? What ever it was, he surely mooned us; that much is clear! There is also no doubt that George Herbert Walker Bush and his family, other religious leaders, the entire American media and many in congress helped him moon us.
Why?
Well, for money, of course, or the darkest medium of exchange, sometimes referred to as “an offer you can’t refuse.” A friendly token of appreciation or something else entirely – most likely, the threat of a political assassination in a respected publication called “The Washington Times”; a publication propped up with billions of illegal cash according to somebody who did his homework many years ago and suffered occupational consequences.
The best way to get the story is to listen to an interview conducted with two brave men who have worked tirelessly to expose this monumental fraud. One of them recounts research which tells ways in which Reverend Sun Myung Moon could have amassed such game changing amounts of money, and the other is a journalist who is an expert on the inner workings of the Moon empire. A video promoting his book follows. It is almost 20 minutes long, but if you want to understand how American culture became so strange, the radio interview and the video below are a MUST HEAR and a MUST SEE, respectively:
Watch The King of America in News | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Some notes:
Although it is widely known that Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s church was considered to be a cult and is even ridiculed by John Belushi in the “Saturday Night Live” video segment provided from the seventies, most information outlets have treated “The Washington Times” with deference over many decades, (including C-Span.) None of these outlets ever mentioned the involvement of Mr. Moon in that publication.
George Herbert Walker Bush acting as former President of the United States gave Reverend Moon essential credibility by taking very large amounts of money in exchange for puzzlingly complimentary speeches in Moon’s favor. Even Moon’s followers were taken by surprise. At least one other member of the Bush family was embellished with riches and – you know who – was helped in his race to “beat” Al Gore by the “Washington Times’s” characteristic smear campaigns of the “dishonest” Gore.
After previously, harshly condemning Reverend Moon, Jerry Falwell accepted millions to save his failing University and praised the action in one of his shameless speeches/sermons, (I don’t know which.)
If you don’t catch anything else from this post, be sure to watch the horrifying/funny segment in the above video starting about five minutes in which recounts some old and quite new lies designed to help supporters of Moon and continues with videos of “The Washington Times” 15th anniversary dinner years before, which includes a speech by Moon which must have sickened the attendees. How many reading this post are more worried about satin then the subject of this post. Why have we been so worried about Rupert Murdock, (who is co-founder with Moon in the “New York Post” publication), and yet totally ignored the influence of Moon at the “water cooler.”
Although former Utah Congressman Chris Cannon was virtually expunged of any involvement in the coronation of Reverend Moon as the new messiah in Utah’s media long ago, “The Washington Times” listed him as a contributor to the effort here.
I hate to say this, but even public radio and television have not exposed this fraud. Tony Blankley, (also Newt Gingrich’s press secretary for seven years), has been allowed to go on countless radio and television programs as a pundit. Although he is routinely sucker-punched by the facts on those programs by their participant’s, he is invited back on, endlessly. Personally, I think a “three lies and you’re out” program should be implemented. David Brooks is on PBS’s “News Hour” almost every night despite the fact that he got his “cred” from Moon’s “Washington Times” and another awful and totally partisan publication called “The Weekly Standard.” I’m sure there are others who were weaned and introduced into our national conversation by Moon’s corrupt system, (possibly hundreds or more, (I have to work and I’m not even a journalist, so I have no idea)), but I’ll just bet you David and Tony are doing OK financially. I’ll just bet you others have branched out from pretty well paid jobs as “journalists/pundits” from similar organizations. JUST SAYIN’
Four American newspapers, (all right!) 
New York Times, Washington Post, New York Post, Washington Times.
My theory of why American newspapers are dying is that Americans can’t tell truth from fiction. I’m not sure if they ever could. I believe this is by design. Where do we go from here?
To reiterate:
Listen to this. (What is the deal with Gordon Liddy?)
You decide.
Complex Capitalists, Complex Socialists
Posted by Dwight Sheldon Adams in Capitalism, Economy, National Politics, Philosophy, Socialism, Society, This Blog, Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority on April 27, 2010
Caught somewhere between the Cartesian view of the world, in which deconstructive analysis was the key to understanding the world, and systems theory, in which a combinative, constructive view of the world is deemed most accurate, lay Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of Structuralism. Structuralism suffered from the mechanistic, hyper-logical thinking of older eras but bent closer to viewing our holistic reality. In the literary field, where I am most familiar with Structuralism, the tenets of the study are referred to as semiotics. Using semiotic devices, one can create a complete break-down of a story’s plot, represented on only a single line or two, which may then be compared to other stories to find their similarities and distinctions. While a useful tool in understanding interplay, semiotics is somewhat insufficient as the formula for understanding a whole literary piece, just as structuralism is insufficient for understanding the world. Read the rest of this entry »
Simple Capitalists, Simple Socialists
Posted by Dwight Sheldon Adams in Capitalism, Economy, National Politics, Philosophy, Socialism, Society, This Blog, Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority on April 23, 2010
Putting faith in the free market (as described by so many clueless capitalists) is like putting faith in heaven. Heck, I believe it exists and I believe it’s beautiful, but I don’t think it’s here or ever will be (at least not under the power or control of man), and I think it’s utterly useless to discuss it in the context of man’s economic systems. Sort of like putting faith in the mythical socialist land of promise, where everyone works for the sole purpose of helping their fellow man, social and psychological diseases have been eradicated by good will alone, and the bureaucracy is more efficiently run than the most fastidious housekeeper’s home. They’re both ridiculous, they’re both juvenile, and yet too many people don’t seem to have been able to move beyond the vision of the perfect government that they first beheld in 8th grade. Read the rest of this entry »
killed
wounded
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