Funny, you promote the same ideals that got this country into this mess, oh never mind its hardly worth the effort.

Im thinking its often not worth the effort to articulate something that should be obviouse.

I am so disapointed........

How many jobs were 'outsourced" to halliburton and KBR at three times the cost of a GI? what a fraud that was eh?

I want to be her sugar daddy!

I was out shopping today and ran into a guy I worked with many years ago he said everyone in the plant is on 32 hours.

I have proposed the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate abuses during the Bush-Cheney Administration -- so they never happen again. These abuses may include the use of torture, warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, and executive override of laws.

Please sign this online petition, urging Congress to consider establishing a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the Bush-Cheney Administration's abuses.

Thank you,

Patrick Leahy
U.S. Senator
http://ga3.org/campaign/btcpetition?qp_source=btc%5faw

sign up at the link above

I still got work but with 16 years on my union job I now find myself on midnight shift due to layoffs. I suppose I am lucky to still have a job (yawn) cant seem to get enough sleep on this shift.

If you watch the pundits on cable news or read the big-name newspaper columnists, you will find a general consensus that the national Republicans are returning to their core principles in their near-unanimous opposition to President Barack Obama’s stimulus bill and other proposals.

Republicans are taken at their word when they claim to be motivated by ideological consistency in opposing Obama’s “big government” solutions to America’s economic troubles, not by a political desire to strangle Obama’s presidency in the cradle.

Despite this Washington “conventional wisdom,” there is a growing sense across the United States that the Republicans are lying about their motivations, that their real reason for trying to obstruct Obama is not principle but political opportunism, that they want the President to fail so they can succeed at the polls.

One of the most telling responses to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll was what people said in answering Question 44: “Do you think [Republicans] opposed [the stimulus bill] mostly because they thought it would be bad for the economy or mostly for political reasons?”

Sixty-three percent of respondents cited “political reasons” and only 29 percent believed the “not good for the economy” explanation from the Republicans. This two-to-one margin suggests that the Republicans are suffering from a serious credibility gap.

Public incredulity also was a common reaction to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to President Obama’s Tuesday night speech to a joint session of Congress. Jindal didn’t seem to have much to offer that would address the severity of America’s economic crisis.

However, in a moment of candor, Jindal acknowledged that the Republicans of the George W. Bush era had failed to live up to their promises of fiscal restraint.

“You elected Republicans to champion limited government, fiscal discipline and personal responsibility,” Jindal said. “Instead, Republicans went along with earmarks and big government spending in Washington. Republicans lost your trust, and rightly so.”

But something bigger may be afoot than Jindal’s notion that some well-meaning Republicans went to the big city of Washington and lost their ideological bearings.

In my three decades as a Washington-based journalist, what I have witnessed is a Republican Party that has grown increasingly arrogant about its ability to twist reality into any shape of its choosing – and to get lots of gullible people to go along.

As a reporter, I was familiar with the typical political spin and the occasional outright lie. But the Republican Party that emerged from the post-Watergate era was building its own right-wing media infrastructure that took deception to new heights, unabashedly declaring that up is down and then punishing anyone who disagreed.

The Lefever Case

On a personal level, I first encountered this technique of cognitive dissonance in 1981 when President Ronald Reagan appointed Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights. The post had been created by President Jimmy Carter to make human rights a higher priority.

Reagan was hostile to the concept, viewing right-wing dictators in Latin America and the Third World as vital allies in the Cold War. However, instead of junking the human rights position, Reagan selected someone who was anathema to the human rights community. Reagan simply declared that Ernest Lefever was a great advocate of human rights.

Even as it became clear that Lefever had cozy ties to the apartheid government of South Africa and other repressive regimes, it was difficult for the mainstream press to contest Reagan’s bald-faced assertion that Lefever was pro-human rights.

Though the right-wing media infrastructure and its anti-journalism attack groups were at relatively early stages of development, any mainstream journalist who challenged Reagan’s Orwellian twist on the phrase “human rights” could expect to be targeted for public attack for "liberal bias." It was easier to just go along.

In 1981, as an Associated Press reporter, I was one of a handful of journalists who helped expose Lefever’s fondness for white European colonizers of black Africa. In his writings, he had stressed the beneficence of the white conquerors and lamented the barbarism of the black natives. When I interviewed members of Lefever’s family, they recalled some of his personal comments that they regarded as racist.

Finally, in the face of mounting evidence that the proposed human-rights coordinator appeared to consider some people more human than others, the Reagan administration was forced to withdraw Lefever’s nomination. He was replaced by a bright, young neoconservative named Elliott Abrams.

Abrams easily won confirmation though he, too, had a selective view of human rights. When I interviewed him at the State Department early in his tenure, he minimized the atrocities committed by U.S.-backed regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala, two countries where soldiers and right-wing paramilitary groups tortured and murdered hundreds of victims a week.

By comparison, Abrams said the human rights situation in Nicaragua was worse, even though there were far, far fewer political killings. Abrams argued that the leftist Nicaraguan government was guilty of worse human rights violations because it suppressed some opposition media and political groups (some of which we learned later were getting covert U.S. funding with the goal of destabilizing and overthrowing the Nicaraguan government).

In other words, even in those early days of the Reagan era, key operatives were confident that they could get away with mind-boggling double standards and word games. They realized that the mainstream press was limited in its ability – or its courage – to call them out on their lies.

This proved to be a key recognition as the Right solidified its domination of Washington. As the right-wing media expanded to include everything from book publishing, magazines and newspapers to radio, TV and eventually the Internet, “perception management” became the watchword of the Republican image-manipulators. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]

The Iran-Contra Experience

Sometimes the brazenness of the lying went over the top. For example, as the Iran-Contra scandal began to unravel in October 1986 – when a contra supply plane was shot down over Nicaragua – President Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush and Elliott Abrams (who had moved on to be assistant secretary of state for Latin America) denied that the plane had any connection to the U.S. government.

After that lie collapsed and the arms-money-and-hostages scandal blew up, Abrams pled guilty to misleading Congress (although he was pardoned in the final days of George H.W. Bush’s presidency).

Reagan and Bush largely escaped the scandal’s legal fallout thanks to the aggressive counterattacks by Republicans and their right-wing media allies against Iran-Contra investigators, particularly special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. The cover-up also was helped along by many cowardly Democrats and much of the mainstream news media. [See Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

What the Right-Wing Machine showed was that it could make big scandals – like Iran-Contra, Iraqgate, contra-cocaine trafficking, etc. – small or even redefine them as not scandals at all.

Yet when Democrats were in power, little scandals – like Bill Clinton’s Whitewater deal and the Travel Office firings – could be made large. Some controversies, such as Al Gore’s apocryphal “I invented the Internet” boast, could be made out of whole cloth.

To a troubling degree, reality became whatever the Republicans and the Right said it was, a faux reality that set the stage for the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush.

Bush’s image itself was mostly a media fiction, that he was a regular guy, just like the rest of us, when in truth he was a privileged plutocrat whose previous failures had been bailed out by his father’s rich friends.

After Bush became President – and especially after 9/11 – the Right wrapped him in a protective cult of personality that tolerated no skepticism. Bush grew even more arrogant about his ability to make up any reality and compel the American people to go along.

So, when Bush and his neocon advisers – with Elliott Abrams back in a key role on the National Security Council – had their hearts set on invading Iraq, a staunchly supportive right-wing media and a thoroughly co-opted mainstream press let him get away with one of the most preposterous cases for war in modern history.

According to Bush, Iraq and its secular ruler Saddam Hussein possessed large caches of WMD and were prepared to share these dangerous weapons with the Islamic fundamentalists of al-Qaeda. None of this made any sense to objective experts, who knew that Iraq had been largely stripped of its WMD and that Hussein hated Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden.

But Bush and his media allies said it was true, so – within Official Washington at least – it became true.

And pity anyone who didn’t go along. Arms-control expert Scott Ritter was smeared as a traitor; United Nations inspectors who searched Iraqi sites and found no WMD evidence were mocked as incompetent buffoons; U.S. intelligence officers who doubted the evidence were marginalized; the Dixie Chicks, whose lead singer criticized Bush’s war plans at a March 2003 concert, were subjected to boycotts and death threats.

Then, when the U.S. invasion force also found no WMD, Bush simply rewrote the history. In July 2003, he began claiming that he had no choice but to invade because Saddam Hussein had refused to let the UN inspectors in. Washington’s courtier press corps stood mute in the face of this lie that became a Bush favorite through the last days of his presidency. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush Still Lies About Iraqi Inspections.”]

Democracy Promotion

After the Iraq-WMD rationale finally became untenable, the U.S. news media accepted a new claim -- that Bush and the neoconservatives wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East. Supposedly, Bush and the neocons so loved democracy that they were ready to conquer Arab countries and kill countless thousands of inhabitants so democracy could be planted.

This new excuse was elevated to the level of uncontestable conventional wisdom, especially after President Bush’s second inaugural address which recited the words “freedom” and “liberty” over and over again.

No big-name journalist ever stopped to ask the question why, if Bush and the neocons were such great lovers of democracy, they would have seized power in Election 2000 after losing the popular vote and only after getting Republican cronies on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes in Florida.

Nor did the sycophantic Washington press corps wonder aloud about the contradiction between loving democracy and the stated aim of Karl Rove and other Bush strategists, establishing “a permanent Republican majority” in Washington, with the Democrats kept around as a cosmetic appendage to give the false appearance of a democratic system.

Given the disdain that Bush, Rove and the neocons had for democracy at home, it made little sense to believe that they actually were invading countries halfway around the world for the cause of democracy.

Indeed, when democratic elections went the “wrong” way – as happened with Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian territories – the Bush administration didn’t hesitate to punish the voters for their erroneous judgments. Bush also didn’t push too hard for democracy among his friends in the Saudi royal family or other autocratic Arab regimes.

Despite all this evidence that “love of democracy” was not a truthful explanation, the Washington press corps continued to disdain alternative (far more plausible) rationales for Bush’s policies. Dumped into the “conspiracy theory” bin, therefore, were suggestions that Bush and the neocons invaded Iraq to project American power east of Suez, or to secure oil supplies, or to eliminate one of Israel’s key enemies.

By transforming Iraq into a U.S. military platform, Bush and the neocons also could seek regime change against other Israeli adversaries, such as Iran and Syria, with the ultimate goal of weakening closer-in enemies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

Of course, such Realpolitik explanations would not have sold too well with the American people. So the Washington press corps put on blinders and focused only on what the Bush administration claimed were the war justifications: Iraq’s WMD and the noble cause of spreading democracy.

Fiscal Restraint?

Back home, Bush and his Republicans also made a mockery of their alleged commitment to fiscal responsibility, both regarding the exploding federal deficit and the vast sums of government money shelled out in no-bid contracts to well-connected corporations, like **** Cheney’s old firm, Halliburton.

Rather than a true free market, the Bush administration – with the help of a Republican-controlled Congress – oversaw an era of crony capitalism that would have put Ferdinand Marcos to shame.

After inheriting a federal government with a nearly balanced budget and years of projected surpluses, Bush rewarded his wealthy friends with huge tax cuts and further pared back regulation of the financial sector, allowing bankers and executives to lavish themselves with multi-million-dollar bonuses and extravagant lifestyles.

By the time Bush left office, the budget deficit had soared to over $1 trillion with oceans of red ink as far as the eye could see, a corrupt Wall Street was in freefall, and millions of Americans had lost their life savings, their jobs and their homes.

At that point, only the most gullible Americans could believe any of the explanations coming from George W. Bush and other Republicans. Nearly everything they had claimed over the years had turned out to be a lie.

Nevertheless, old Washington habits die hard. When President Barack Obama stepped forward with a giant stimulus plan of spending and tax cuts aimed at preventing Bush’s severe recession from morphing into a depression, congressional Republicans demanded that he scrap much of the spending in favor of more tax cuts.

The Republicans also insisted that they were motivated not by a desire to sabotage Obama’s presidency – and thus hasten their restoration of power – but by their deeply held principle of fiscal restraint and their commitment to small government. It wasn’t about power; they said, it was about principle.

Though one might have thought the Washington press corps finally might have had enough of this decades-old Republican ploy of self-serving explanations, pundits and journalists alike again fell into line; the near-unanimous GOP opposition to Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan was motivated by a determination to return to core principles, these Washington insiders agreed.

However, the broader American public was far less credulous. As the recent opinion poll showed, the respondents broke two-to-one in favor of judging the Republican motivation as politics, not principle.

Surely in the months ahead, the powerful right-wing media will do its best to restore Republican credibility and wear down Obama’s – and much of the mainstream U.S. press corps will likely go along.

But at least for now, most of the American people appear to see through the latest rationalizations and the lies.
_______



About author
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20521

End Culture of Corporate Entitlement
by Jim Hightower

I don't mind losing when we lose, but I hate losing when we win.

One big reason that Barack Obama now occupies the big chair in the Oval Office is that he embraced the public's rising indignation at the blatant greed of Wall Street bankers, striking the proper populist tone in last year's presidential election.

After all, these slick financial elites crashed our economy, yet they kept enriching and pampering themselves, even as taxpayers were being forced to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at their failing institutions.

Having won and taken office, Obama proceeded to rip right into the bankers' shameless avarice, denouncing their "culture of narrow self-interest and short-term gain at the expense of everything else."

Great stuff! Go get 'em, Barack!

A week later, however, the president's treasury chief, Timothy Geithner, rolled out the administration's plan to add more than a trillion dollars to the ongoing Wall Street bailout, and -- Holy William Jennings Bryan -- Obama's populist bark had been reduced to a puppy whimper!

It seems that Geithner and Obama's top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers -- both of whom have long been cozy with the very same greed-headed bankers who caused the financial mess we're in -- had been cooing into the president's ears about the "danger" of "harshly" punishing executives and "spooking" private investors.

Thanks to them, even though populist politics won, populist policy lost.

Gone from Obama's proposal is the idea that top managers of the failed banks -- the executives who made the foolhardy investments that brought the system down -- should be ousted (if not tarred and feathered).

Instead, our trillion-plus bucks are to be put right into those same hands! If ignorance is bliss, Geithner and Summers must be ecstatic.

The soft-on-Wall Street boys also prevailed over those who pushed to impose strict limits on the pay of top executives whose banks are getting our bailout money.

While Obama's team did put a $500,000 annual cap on cash paid to the CEO, the restriction does not apply to Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and about 350 other banks that've already grabbed bailout funds. It only applies to those taking money in the next phase of the giveaway.

Also, the executives who do fall under the cash cap can receive unlimited bonuses in the form of stock payments.

The worst part of this political cave-in is not in the details, but in the principle that was abandoned. Obama hit it on the head when he denounced "the culture" of executive entitlement that has infested America's corporate world.

In the past couple of decades, the ethical notion that business leaders should be trustees for the enterprise -- with responsibilities to future shareholders, employees and the larger society -- has been displaced by a singular focus on amassing short-term wealth for the few by driving up the stock price, no matter what shortcuts must be taken to achieve that soulless goal.

CEOs who can jack up those prices, by hook or crook, are hailed as geniuses and treated as royalty, no matter how much damage they're doing to their company or our country.

This celebration of manipulated wealth has even fostered an absurd bit of conventional wisdom that we can't get competent executive talent for a mere $500,000 a year.

This stems from the prevailing (and pernicious) corporate fiction that the best are, by definition, the ones who're paid the most. Yet 500K is 25 percent more than our country's president makes, more than our top-rated non-profit leaders receive, more than most community bankers take and way more than America's finest teachers are paid.

Wall Street conveniently equates compensation with value -- and since CEOs compensate themselves extravagantly, they've come to assume that they are America's most valuable people. Indispensable, even.

It is this self-aggrandizing corporate culture that must be changed. Sadly, Geithner, Summers -- and Obama -- have instead advanced that culture by failing to hold some of its worst practitioners accountable for their enormously destructive actions.

Cpyright 2009 Creators Syndicate Inc.
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/23-9

congrats but I think work is over rated:

If Democrats want to come out of this economic crisis with a powerful mandate to continue running the country, they need to bag the nonsensical talk of “bi-partisanship” and tackle two big lies that have been stymieing progressives for decades.

The first lie is that the only solution to the nation’s deepening health care crisis, which now has over 42 million people—roughly one in seven Americans—living without any health insurance or ready access to medical care, is a combination of limitations on treatment and continued reliance on the private health insurance industry.

The second lie is that Social Security, the single most important economic “safety net” under the lives of America’s elderly, its disabled, and children who lose a wage-earning parent, is headed for “bankruptcy” and needs to have its already skimpy benefits cut back.

Let’s start with healthcare. The single biggest problem with health care in America is that because it is run largely as a profit-making venture, fully 20 percent of every healthcare dollar has to go towards paperwork to take care of both the billing, and the monitoring of those who do the billing, to make sure providers and insurers are not bilking the system and/or the patients. Another significant percentage of each healthcare dollar, despite all that paperwork, is wasted by fraud that goes undetected—either in the form of unnecessary treatments and medications, or simple billing fraud.

Just one example of this: Most hospitals, built with federal assistance under the Hill-Burton funding program, are required to provide a certain amount of free care to indigent patients who do not qualify for Medicaid or Medicare, but who also have no assets. But as anyone who has gone to a hospital emergency room without an insurance card knows, when the bill comes for such treatment, it can easily top $2000 for just a quick exam by a nurse practitioner and a dose of aspirin. Why? Because the hospitals want these absurdly inflated charges to count against their “uncompensated care” obligation. They know that poor patients are never going to pay these bills, so they later just shift them into their “free care” column. Insurers like Blue Cross or state Medicare programs don’t reimburse them at anywhere near those inflated rates, but that’s not the point.

In any event, where the big lie comes into play is in the politicians’ refusal to consider simply making Medicare, the healthcare program for the elderly, universal, which would effectively move the US to a Canadian-style health system, with a few tweaks. Sure, making the government the single insurer of all Americans would mean higher taxes, but any honest accounting of this shift would have to consider how much we ordinary middle-class and working-class Americans are paying now for health care. For those who have employer-funded health plans, they are typically paying anything from 20% to 100% of the premiums, or a portion for themselves and 100% for other family members. These payments can run into hundreds of dollars a month or even more. But really, the sums being paid by the employer have to be added into the cost too, because that is money that otherwise the employer could be paying out in wages. For many working families, we could be talking about as much as $10,000 a year or even more just for insurance coverage. And of course, these plans don’t cover everything. There are co-pays and deductibles that come out of the workers’ incomes, and that can total several thousand dollars a year. The politicians neglect to point out that by putting everyone on Medicare, all those costs are eliminated.

Furthermore, by making the government the “single-payer” insurer, the public’s bargaining power over private doctors and hospitals is enormously enhanced, allowing us, as the government, to bargain for lower rates for office visits, exams, and hospital stays and procedures. Choice of physician is actually expanded, because no doctor would be allowed to refuse to accept Medicare as payment in full, and there would be no other option for doctors to receive payment.

There is a reason why the percentage of Gross Domestic Product devoted to health care in the US is roughly 50% higher (and in some cases two times higher) than in any of the countries with socialized medicine, like Canada, Britain, France, Germany or Japan. There is also a reason why the health statistics—life expectancy, infant mortality, survival rates from various medical conditions, etc.—are higher in those countries than in the US.--and are higher even in much poorer countries that also have public health care systems. (There is also a reason why socialized medical programs have survived in all those countries even during periods when governments have been in the hands of conservatives—the public would rebel if any effort were made to eliminate them.)

As for Social Security, I always have to laugh when I hear conservatives intone about the threat that Social Security will be technically insolvent in 2041. These are, recall, the same people who a year ago didn’t have a clue that the economy was about to go into a death spiral. And we’re supposed to believe in their prognostications about the state of a program whose fortunes are very closely linked to economic growth models, not five years out or ten years out, but 32 years out. (The 2041 doomsday deadline is based upon a very conservative estimate for annual average economic growth over the intervening three decades.)

Just as an exercise, try to think back to 1977 for a minute. If you are in your 20s or 30s, you are excused, since you cannot think back that far. Let’s see: Jimmy Carter was president, oil was being rationed, the Vietnam War had only just ended, songs like the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light,” Bob Seeger’s “Night Moves” and the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” were topping the charts, and the biggest existential threat to mankind was nuclear war between the US and the USSR, which back then was still a country.

What will America and the world be like in another 32 years? You can bet that it will be as far removed from anything you can imagine as today is from what we were imagining back in 1977.

There are many things that should worry us a hell of a lot more about that distant future a generation hence than the financial condition of the Social Security Trust Fund. Just take the crisis of global climate change. In 2041, scientists are pretty certain that there will be no polar icecap in the summer. Now that is big—it has never happened in the history of mankind on this planet, and we know it is a change that will have profound impacts on climate all around the globe, many of them terrifying. But are any of those people who are all bent out of shape over the future of Social Security frantically calling for action to deal with climate change? No. In fact, oddly, the very people who get so worked up about the imagined crisis 30 years from now in a government program are the ones most likely to be unconcerned about climate change.

The big lie here is that Social Security is not some kind of savings account, where you get back what you put in, with accumulated interest. Social Security is a promise, by the government, and more broadly—this being still a democracy of sorts—by the public, to provide a basic income for retirees and the disabled. And the fulfillment of that promise at any given time is going to depend upon the political calculus of who wants to pay for that promise. I would argue that the system is largely self-correcting. That is, when the demands on the system are greatest, because of a larger number of retirees collecting benefits relative to working adults who are paying taxes into the system, those who are receiving assistance have a relatively greater political clout, because of their increased numbers. The Baby Boom population, which is the proximate cause of concerns about Social Security funds “running out” will also be the most powerful senior lobby in history when they (we, actually, as I am about to turn 60 myself!) are receiving Social Security benefits. With twice the voting strength of the already powerful senior lobby today, Baby Boomer retirees will be in a position to demand, and to get, decent retirement benefits, even if that means higher taxes on current workers and employers.

Nor does that imply a “generational war”—another boogeyman raised by conservatives. The younger working generation, by and large, will be the children and grandchildren of the Boomer retirees, and many if not most of them will be enthusiastically supporting their older relatives’ demands for better benefits. Just ask yourself, when have you ever heard a child complaining about the size of her or his parents’ Social Security check? And yet even today, current benefits are at least partially funded by current workers’ payroll deductions.

The point here is that progressives should resist any effort to lend credence to conservative calls for cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare. Any calls by Democrats, including President Barack Obama, for “bi-partisan” commissions to study Medicare and Social Security are simply cave-ins to ideologically motivated right-wing politicians and their corporate backers, who want to destroy two of the most important public-benefit programs run by the federal government. Democrats need to mount a “Hands Off Social Security and Medicare!” campaign to put themselves squarely in defense of these programs.

There is an urgent need to fundamentally change the way health care is run in the US, and the way forward is to expand Medicare to cover everyone. No longer will healthcare be primarily funded by employers, who are able to use that benefit as a way of holding workers hostage to their jobs (and discouraging them from going out on strike). No longer will we have one in seven Americans unable to see a doctor. No longer will we have staffs of medical personnel working at insurance companies with the sole responsibility of denying needed care to insured people. Longer term, we will find that as the grotesque profits are taken out of the system, the type of person who is attracted to the medical profession will change, from money-hungry entrepreneurs to people who are motivated by a desire to do good and to serve mankind.

Creating a national health system will not happen through bi-partisan compromise. Nor will the Social Security system be defended by compromising with those who have been committed to its destruction since the day it was established back in the New Deal. These are things that Democrats need to do in the face of Republican opposition. They are the bedrock progressive programs on which a lasting progressive American political system can be built.

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/273

02-22) 04:00 PST Washington - -- If 30 years of financial crises teach anything - in Scandinavia, Japan, other parts of Asia and Latin America - the worst is not over for the U.S. economy. But that may be the good news.


This time, a tightly interdependent world has entered a synchronized contraction. Pretty much everyone is in trouble, leaving the world without an engine.

"We are in economic terra incognita," said Joseph Grundfest, a finance professor at Stanford University and co-director of the Rock Center on Corporate Governance.

If the averages of previous crises hold, Americans can expect unemployment to reach 11 or 12 percent, housing prices nationally to drop 36 percent, stocks to lose more than half their value, and real output per capita to plunge 9.3 percent, according to economists Carmen Reinhart of the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University, who have tracked financial crises back to 14th century England.

"Certainly the averages themselves are pretty discouraging," said Reinhart. "Because this crisis is as bad as they come."

Pessimists observe that Japan's Nikkei stock index peaked around 39,000 in 1989 and two decades later is languishing around 7,500. Japan's real estate market still has not recovered after 17 years. The Dow Jones index did not rebound from the 1929 U.S. stock market crash until 1954.

A global calamity
What began as misdiagnosed tremors two years ago in U.S. subprime mortgages have spread in one way or another to every part of the globe: from Iceland and Ireland to the United Kingdom and Germany, from Japan to China and Singapore, Brazil to Mexico, the Middle East to Russia.

The latest is Eastern Europe, on the brink of a meltdown. Western European banks made euro and Swiss franc loans for homes and cars to people whose incomes are paid in Hungarian forints and Latvian lats. Many of those currencies have crashed, making the debts unaffordable.

New York University economist Nouriel Roubini, who warned of the crisis early on and is now widely followed, warned Thursday of a long, ugly Japanese-style "stag-deflation: a deadly combination of stagnation, recession and deflation." Roubini cited shocking fourth-quarter growth figures in key regions: 3.8 percent annualized decline in the United States, an 8 percent drop in Germany, a 13 percent drop in Japan, and a 20 percent decline in Korea. Taiwan's exports have fallen 40 percent, and its gross domestic product has plunged 8.3 percent, the worst since records began in 1952.

Banks are in denial
"The global economy is now literally in free fall as the contraction of consumption, capital spending, residential investment, production, employment, exports and imports is accelerating rather than decelerating," Roubini wrote.

"In Europe, we've discovered banks have even bigger problems than banks here, and yet they're in denial still," said UC Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen. "Not only do they have half of all subprime losses in Europe, but they've lent to extremely highly leveraged, risky Eastern European countries that are now falling apart. In Asia, they're having declines in industrial production on a scale that has never been seen in the history of the world."

Any psychologist examining capitalism would quickly diagnose a manic depressive. Today's upheavals, coming after a generation of relative calm in the United States, may seem shocking to Americans who have primly observed bank runs in Argentina or scoffed at Japan's inexplicable reluctance to bury its zombie banks.

But financial crises have been common since the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and have grown more frequent in the last three decades, affecting larger and larger countries.

The problems always begin with asset bubbles that make every investor look smart. Neighbors envy neighbors getting rich and jump on board, often taking on debt to do so. Bubbles always burst, ending in tears and handcuffs and leaving everyone poorer.

It is human nature to "forget what happened before, to think that we've reinvented penicillin," said Reinhart, whose forthcoming book with Rogoff is called "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly." People think, "Oh yes, these things have happened, but they happened to somebody else, somewhere else, at another point in time. They don't happen to us. If you look at the mentality in the run-up to the current crisis, that's exactly what was going on with the real estate market."

For all the criticisms of Japan's long delays in cleaning up its insolvent banks after a spectacular real estate and stock market crash in the early 1990s - leading to a "lost decade" of economic stagnation - the United States has followed an eerily similar path. The government has fumbled for months in costly efforts to fix troubled U.S. banks, many of which are zombies in their own right. Analysts say the biggest may be insolvent, holding hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-related debt of dubious value.

Loan prospects dim
Hobbled by bad debts, the banks cut back lending, which slows the economy, and as the economy slows, bank assets deteriorate further and loan prospects worsen, creating a vicious cycle. There is wide agreement, based on Japan's experience, that the banks must be healed before the economy can recover.

Analysts outside the administration are increasingly concluding that the government will have to temporarily nationalize many U.S. banks. The latest to join the chorus is former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the fallen icon of laissez-faire, who broached the idea last week.

"If you look at Japan, if you look at Sweden, if you look at the S&L crisis in the U.S., it's clear what's going to happen," said Pete Kyle, who holds a chair in finance at the University of Maryland. "What's going to happen is the bad assets are going to be removed from the banks, the government is going to wind up owning the assets and winding them down. The government will take its losses and, over time, maybe 10 or 15 years, we'll figure out how much money we've lost."

The banks also need new capital, maybe $1 trillion to $2 trillion more. "The only issue is how fast it's going to occur," Kyle said. "The slower it occurs, the more likely we are to have a Japan scenario. The faster it occurs, the quicker we will get a recovery."

This is the fourth and biggest wave of financial crises of the last quarter century, said Robert Aliber, an international economist at the University of Chicago and contributor to a landmark history of financial panics by the late economist Charles Kindleberger. First came the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s, fed by foreign bank loans. Next was the bursting of property and stock bubbles in Scandinavia and Japan in the early 1990s, followed by the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Oil, grain prices plunge
China and others "believed if they had low values on their currencies and large trade surpluses, they would get rich," Aliber said. "And of course they have gotten rich." But now demand for Japanese autos, Singaporean electronics and Chinese manufactured goods is plummeting. Likewise, commodity exporters - Russia, Venezuela, Canada, Brazil, Iran - have seen prices plunge for their oil and grains.

"These countries that a year ago had the world by the (tail) are finding out that life is very different when commodity prices are one third as high as they were," Aliber said. "It's emasculating Putin's foreign policy."

Others such as Iceland and some in Eastern Europe "lived off the carry trade, borrowing cheap foreign money, or at least the money they thought was cheaper than their own," Aliber said.

Aliber thinks the cycle may soon bottom out. Crashes, like bubbles, always end. Rather than a fifth wave, he expects the next excess to be over-regulation and too-cautious lending.

Others are must less optimistic. Policymakers "are still very much behind the curve," said UC Davis economist Alan Taylor, who says this crisis has no direct parallels in the past, given its size and interdependence of the global economy. "That's making it a little bit difficult to extrapolate from previous cases, except to say it's probably going to be a lot worse."


Stimulus and taxes: One thing in formulas is clear - federal tax breaks will be undercut by state tax hikes, Kathleen Pender writes. Business, D1


E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/22/MNNA161178.DTL&tsp=1

Were not in that bad of a recession? every economic guru claims its the worst since the great depression I suppose you know better than the educated experts? I am not following your logic at all. but I may be in over my head I had thought we imported oil so your logic dictates that with less imports of oil(due to high gas prices) our GDP debt ratio would fall?

Did we not have an oil boom in the Bush years? with oil prices sky high? With your logic then we would have had an artificial job creation in the oil fields and thus we would not be in this economic mess.

Its class warfare that is the main culprit. The elites who created the mess and wrecked the whole damn thing managed to get the taxpayers to bail them out and give themselves bonuses to boot. Its a middle class takedown.

I admit freely that I drank from the Democratic/Obama Kool-Aid punch bowl. The taste of that Kool-Aid has now soured beyond the point of drinkability. Make no mistake; the Bush/McCain/Republican punch bowl was much more than soured, it was pure poison. Two things since Obama took office have totally soured my taste for the Democratic/Obama Kool-Aid. The first and most damaging is the commitment of the administration to send an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan. The second is the watered down and probably ineffective "Stimulus Package." I will now examine each of these in detail and why I think the "Glimmer of Hope" that was Obama is now a "Candle in the Wind."

The "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan are myth, public relations fabrications. They are NOT wars. They are invasions and occupations of over matched sovereign countries. The war mongering Right has been allowed to define these illegal and immoral actions in terms that sound patriotic and reasonable. The talking pinheads of the Right abuse the term "Liberal" constantly by characterizing Obama has being a radical Liberal. They have skewed the perceived middle point so far to the right, that traditional Conservatives like Barry Goldwater seem to be radical Liberals. President Obama is no Liberal and the sending of additional troops to Afghanistan is the most obvious proof.

He claims to have been against the Iraqi invasion from the beginning and I take him at his word so far, watching to see if the withdrawals from Iraq happen in a timely fashion. The continuation of construction of permanent bases within Iraq however has raised my level of skepticism. My first active participation in a presidential race was in 1972, with George McGovern running against Tricky **** Nixon. I abhorred the killing and dying in Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia. Today I abhor the killing and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan even more, if that is possible. The best and most patriotic of our young people have died and are dying for no good reason. We as a country have enough blood of innocents, in all three countries, on our hands to rival the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot. We have failed to learn from history and the death toll keeps rising. We have seen the face of evil and it stares back from our mirrors.

When Bush/Cheney took office, the country had a surplus and there was a lot of talk of what to do with the "Peace Dividend." Tax cuts were the favorite of the Right because they no longer wanted the "free loading poor" putting their hands out. Never mind the radical overhaul to the Welfare System that took place under Clinton. Then 9/11/2001 occurred. All talk of a Peace Dividend disappeared and the drums of war began to beat loudly. Strangely though, the tax cuts for the rich and corporations stayed with us. The Right proceeded to tax less and spend more. They proved to have no basic arithmetic skills except lining their own bank accounts. The recipe for the ultimate distraction was put into place. We are now faced with economic troubles that may rival the Great Depression of 1920's and 1930's.

We have had tax cuts since Reagan took office in 1981. There is some evidence that for the short term they might help but in the long term they have failed to stave off longer and deeper recessions. Despite being elected with a firm mandate, Obama proposed a Stimulus Package that was flawed through compromise from the beginning. The results of making a third of his package tax cuts were the votes of three Republican Senators and NO Republican Representatives. Comparable money spent to bail out bankers and stockbrokers passed Congress without the same need to compromise. The rich were protected while the poor and middle class were screwed again.

People are worried about their homes, their next paycheck and even their next meal. They don't want to be bothered by the killing, dying and waste of Iraq and Afghanistan. The sleight of hand of keeping the economy in the forefront while the killing and dying continue is despicable. We are in this economic meltdown because of the military spending. Spending on Iraq and Afghanistan will need to stop before real recovery can start at home.

My hope today is that Obama can resist the wind and keep the candle lit. To do that, he must become the radical Liberal that the pinheads accuse him of being. He must embrace the light. Then and only then can the sourness of the Kool-Aid be alleviated.

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About author
Life long liberal, Actually saw JFK on campaign trail, Defining moment of my life; Day JFK assassinated, Proof system can work: Day Nixon resigned, Proof system can be broken: Day Nixon Pardoned and Continuing revelations of Bush's crimes.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/20393

HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods. A high consumer can take in about 20 teaspoons of HFCS per day. The chemical was found most commonly in HFCS-containing dairy products, dressings and condiments.

The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common.


Sources:

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy January 26, 2009

Washington Post January 26, 2009

Environmental Health January 2009, 8:2