Tag: economic meltdown

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Sorry GOP, if you do win in the midterms it won’t be because people want you to trash the economy again

Caught a couple of good articles on the Internets today. One talked about why the Democrats might lose the 2010 midterm elections and another talked about how to fix the short term deficit problem. The fix doesn’t include cutting social security or electing Republicans – as smart people know.

Democrats won their massive majority because of an economic collapse. They’ve passed so much legislation because they have a massive majority based on an economic collapse. But the economic collapse isn’t over. And having a lot more seats than the other party means 1) voters blame you for the condition of the country, and 2) you have a lot of seats to lose. What the bad economy and the huge majority giveth, the bad economy and the huge majority taketh away. Om.

The incredible obviousness of the Democrats’ political fortunes

*Side Note* One reason it seems people aren’t happy with the President and the Democrats is because they still can’t rub two stones together to get us to see their half-assed watered down legislation (like the Health care reform and the recent financial reform bills for example) is the bees knees.

Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn’t even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn’t work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama’s half assed “left wing” policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a “socialist” this means that Obama’s policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

Blaming the blogosphere for Democratic Failures

That leads us to the real fix for the deficit since the Republicans and other idiots insist on “fixing” it:

First, the facts. Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do.

Deficits of Mass Destruction

The deficit hawks would be satisfied and it doesn’t include Republicans or trashing the economy.

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Senator Jon Kyl: douche bag – Saint Ronnie Reagan: thief

No joke that elected Republicans in Congress hate the unemployed. Latest proof is this week’s douche Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl who claimed that tax cuts for the rich are needed more than unemployment benefits. Also it seems that Saint Ronald Reagan was more into wealth redistribution and it wasn’t to regular Americans.

The second highest ranking Republican in the Senate doubled down on a controversial statement he made this weekend, arguing in greater detail that tax cuts for wealthy people should never be offset by tax increases in other areas — but that unemployment benefits need to be fully paid for by either spending cuts or tax increases. In so doing, he claimed candidly that the very existence of unemployment insurance is a “necessary evil,” while tax cuts ought not be paid for by increases in order to make it easier to shrink the size of government.

Kyl: Rich Need Tax Cuts More Than Jobless Need Benefits

And the truth about President Ronald Reagan and his economic policy when he took office in 1981:

“Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then. Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down. This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top.”

6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped Cause the Economic Destruction of America

So the long and short is the Reagan Era brought out a redistribution of wealth from regular people to the very rich that we see today.

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Big business is NOT our friend

I have been watching the events surrounding the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and it reaffirms my philosophy that Big Business is NOT our friend.

I’m not a Marxist or advocate state ownership of business but I do feel that industry needs to be heavily regulated. Big businesses, left to their own devices, will screw us over in some form if we aren’t watching them like a hawk. The corporation only answers to their owners and shareholders. With some rare exceptions, benevolence from big business only exists if it doesn’t cost them very much money and if they benefit from it.

History is full of the damage and chaos when big business is left to run amok. The big example is the Crash of 1929. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 89 percent of its value by 1932 and put us into a depression that didn’t subside until the start of World War II. That was 12 years of massive unemployment and suffering.

We had the robber barons of the 19th century which included John D. Rockefeller, John Jacob Astor and Andrew Carnegie. These guys were the Goldman Sachs and AIG of their day. Men like that were known for extensive use of child labor, deadly working conditions and strong arm tactics if workers complained.

Upton Sinclair wrote “The Jungle” that exposed conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry and led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Now we seem to be returning to those days when you didn’t know if your food or medicine was safe. The food industry have worked for years to reduce the regulations in place.

More recent follies included the Savings and Loan crash in the 1980s and there was Black Monday in October 1987 when the stock market dropped 500 points or 22.6 percent of value. We’re still experiencing the damage from the crash in 2008 and the collapse of the housing loan market.

The BP oil spill isn’t the first or last example of big business raping our environment in the name of profits. Google “superfund” and you will find a lot of information on trashed environments that taxpayers paid to have cleaned up — places like Love Canal, Times Beach and smaller locations like old factories that found it was cheaper to dump their hazardous wastes on their property than to have it properly disposed.

The problem with “big business” is shown in little ways as well. Grocery chains don’t locate in low income areas so those people are forced to pay more for their food. Money and favorable policies meant to help family farms end up going to agriculture conglomerates like ConAgra. Wal-mart treats their employees so bad that many have to apply for food stamps and welfare to make ends meet.

What bothers me the most is most people let these things happen or look the other way. One reaction is that they would rather have a cheaper price than a company that acts ethically and responsibly. Big business isn’t the driver of the economy. The engine of our economy is small businesses— the mom and pop locally owned shops and services. Big business’ charity work comes from their advertising budget and most of their profit leaves the area and contributes nothing where they operate.

An obstacle to stopping this screw over is the government. Legislators in D.C. or in the states are bought and paid for by big bushiness in some way. Both Democrats and Republicans. If we want to return our country to the people we need to only vote for people who will refuse to be bought.

Unless that happens, things like the BP oil spill will continue.

*This article appeared in the July/August 2010 issue of The Central Ohio Humanist*

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Real people screwed over by GOP obstructionism

Dear GOP, Just to let you know that real people are being hurt because you hate the unemployed. In this video from my local television station showed that 7500 people in my county will lose their benefits and not all of them are “just lazy”.

Real people screwed over by GOP obstructionism

On this holiday weekend, please GOP stop hating America.

*Update*

Here is more proof that the GOP talking point about “the lazy unemployed” is full of crap. Jason Linkins at Huffington Post wrote:

But Linder’s example happens to be an exception. The basic reality for America’s job seekers is that currently there are five people looking for work for every job opening. The average unemployment benefit is a scant $290 per week. And, as Arthur Delaney reported on these pages in early June, there are other difficult-to-ignore facts that harpoon the notion that the unemployed are content to live off benefits:

Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that only 67 percent of the 15 million unemployed receive benefits. Even if all those people are enjoying the dole, shouldn’t businesses still be able to hire some of the other five million receiving no benefits at all?

Exactly. If unemployment benefits truly tamp down the motivation of job seekers, there would still be about five million people going after the jobs that Sharron Angle believes exist with a rabid intensity.

Unemployed Working Hard To Find Jobs, Despite Depiction As Spoiled Brats

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No Doubt Republicans Hate the Unemployed

On Thursday June 24, the elected Republicans in the Senate gave more evidence that they hate the unemployed. The Senate rejected an extension of unemployment benefits for 1.2 million people. People who have never lost a job can decide that others who have no job don’t “deserve” help. Normal people should be outraged about that. But there is other insults the GOP heaped on the unemployed.

Rachel Maddow summed it up best:

MADDOW: We’ve got the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression. This is going to have repercussions in our country and in our culture for generations. The political leadership we’re seeing on the right in response to that called the unemployed animals, drug test them, call them bums, say they’re only out of jobs because they’re lazy and want to be. Insult, insult, insult. To add real injury to all of that insult today every Republican in the Senate plus our friend Ben Nelson, blocked a vote on a bill to provide badly needed help to the long-term unemployed in this country.

And as a result, starting tomorrow, more than a million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits. This might sound like something you’ve heard before. This is the sort of thing that’s been knocking around in and out of the headlines for months now. And it’s true. It’s because Republicans have blocked extensions of unemployment benefits before. It’s kind of been a Republican hobbyhorse lately.

But in the past, the measure has always been saved at the last minute. That didn’t happen this time. Senate Republicans and Ben Nelson really are cutting off the benefits for 1.2 million unemployed people and probably tossing at least some of them out on the street. And as an added bonus, they’re giving up the opportunity to stimulate the economy in the most efficient way we know how. Ta da.

This pisses me off. As someone who has been on public assistance in the past and know many who are on assistance or unemployment, I can tell you NO ONE WANTS TO BE UNEMPLOYED. Republicans just rehash the old “welfare queen” red herring whenever real people need help. They didn’t bat an eye bailing out the banks and automakers but when real people need help they complain about the deficit.

The Democrats in the Senate don’t get off the hook totally. Why in the hell do you keep letting the GOP screw the pooch? Need 60 votes for unemployment extension? Really? Knock the shit off and act like a majority party. Letting a minority of 41 control things make you all look stupid.

Of course passing out checks without doing anything substantial to solve the economic problem won’t solve the jobs problem in the long run but not putting oil in a car low on oil just because it hasn’t reached 3,000 miles isn’t going to be good for a car either.

As blogger digby noted:

I have thought from the beginning of the crisis that this was a problem. I could tell from some conversations I was having that people were under the misapprehension that the deficit caused the recession and that ending the deficit is the only way to fix the economy. Many wingnuts are making that explicit claim.

This is one of the reasons why I have been so frantic that the administration was feeding into the deficit hysteria. They don’t seem to get that people don’t actually care about “the deficit,” they care about “the economy” and they fail to make a distinction between the two, especially since we have right wing wrecking crew that makes a point of conflating the two.

Conflation Fail

I just don’t have time for people who are soooooo full of themselves, who lack any minimal amount of compassion, and who refuse to see the world outside their self involved bubble.

Here is an example:

Missouri farmer David Jungerman has raised the hackles of local residents with a politically-charged sign he’s placed on his “45-foot-long, semi-truck box trailer” on his farm. The trailer reads: “Are you a Producer or Parasite Democrats – Party of the Parasites.” Now, the Kansas City Star reveals that Jungerman has been the recipient of over a million dollars of federal farm subsidies since 1995

Trying to defend himself, Jungerman told the press, “That’s just my money coming back to me. I pay a lot in taxes. I’m not a parasite.”

Farmer who put up sign claiming Democrats are ‘party of parasites’ has taken $1 million in farm subsidies.

What this Einstein doesn’t know or refuses to know is even people on welfare pay taxes. They may not pay income taxes but they do pay sales tax plus they paid taxes when they did have a job. Don’t they deserve to get back the taxes they paid?

Jungerman reminded me of those morons during the health care reform town halls when they shouted they didn’t want government run health care while admitting they were on Medicare.

What should really make a normal human mad is that the extension only would have added 0.00043 percent to the national debt.

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