Amazon Is Just Like Walmart

Undercut prices at first, and then jack prices up when the competition is gone. Worse still is the whole idea of "eBooks," which is nothing more than downloading for rent rather than owning a hard copy. People flocked to that thing for the convenience not realizing the convenience is an inferior experience, not to mention you don't own one goddamned thing you download.

John Grisham was right when he said that the aim of Bezos was to destroy publishing houses, and you know what this ultimately means. It ultimately means controlling ideas. Scary shit.

Krugman has it right about what the monopolizing Bezos is doing.

It's like we never learn a goddamned thing about monopolies. Unfortunately, our federal government is so totally worthless--by design--that any chance of controlling outfits like Amazon is nil.

How the "Science" of Economics Turned into a Form of the Occult

or simply a cult without the "oc" is evident from this "no shit" piece from Paul Krugman.

I don't know why it took people so stinking long to see the obvious. I saw this decades ago and warned people about it the minute policymakers were following the crackpot Chicago School economic theories.

Of course I am not Ivy League-educated, so what did I know other than I was right?

All anybody had to do was ask why all of these regulations were put in. It wasn't to stifle capitalism but to save it, for crying out loud, thanks to what happened during the Great Depression. You can't have unrestrained greed--people get hurt and societies can't be sustained by a handful of parasites at the top and everybody else poor. Revolution necessarily results from it.

It's like we have to revisit this crap a couple of times a century when younger generations come along and don't have any firsthand knowledge or secondhand knowledge (through parents who lived through hard times) of how bad it was, and thank God for the regulations and people like FDR.

The biggest problem we have now, as thirty years ago, is with the elected officials, especially those in D.C., who are completely bought and paid for by the elites who like the current disaster just fine because they have profited from it. They have NO intention of giving up "their" wealth, the wealth they stole from the rest of us by gaming the tax laws and getting their puppets to pass more favorable legislation.

Krugman:

But policy makers and politicians have ignored both the textbooks and the lessons of history. And the result has been a vast economic and human catastrophe, with trillions of dollars of productive potential squandered and millions of families placed in dire straits for no good reason.

They have no intention of changing course, either.

We. are. fucked.

They Aren't "Centrists"

Almost all of the D.C. political spectrum these days is between far right and batshit crazy. The Democratic Party has been hijacked by neoliberal policymakers, billionaires, and Wall Street crooks, and it doesn't have to be an organized group called Third Way, either.

The Democratic Party isn't the same party it was even ten years ago, the Rubenites and Clintonites notwithstanding, and it has gotten outright awful with the election in 2008 of a total fake in the White House.

I don't know where Paul Krugman has been all these years. It's been obvious the Democratic Party has been infected with a cancer called neoliberalism, and the party is now in a terminal stage unless or until these frauds are purged from the party.

The Third Way is part of the neoliberal game that most of our politicians in D.C. subscribe to in one way or the other.

People look at how batshit the GOP is and say, "Oh, look how HORRIBLE they are!" Then they turn around and vote for these neoliberal fakers posing as Democrats who put through the same damned thing as the GOP would pull. Actually, it's more likely those things would go through because of these fakers since people are so conned by the "D" after their names.

The Democratic Party isn't the same party it was even ten years ago thanks to these fakers. It's sickening.

Krugman points out the Peter J. Peterson agenda of destroying Social Security and Medicare:

So progressive Democrats have seized on an op-ed by the group Third Way — an op-ed attacking Elizabeth Warren and Bill de Blasio for their terrible, horrible economic populism — as a way to start reclaiming the party from the “centrists”. And it’s working: the centrists are very much on the run.

Why? Part of the answer is that the Democratic party has become more progressive. But I would argue that the centrists are also suffering from their own intellectual bankruptcy.

I mean, going after Warren and de Blasio for not being willing to cut Social Security and their “staunch refusal to address the coming Medicare crisis” ??? Even aside from the question of exactly what the mayor of New York has to do with Medicare, this sounds as if they have been living in a cave for years, maybe reading an occasional screed from the Pete Peterson complex.

Those people are bought and paid for by crooks like Peter J. Peterson, including and especially Obama, who cannot be trusted to preserve anything remotely seen as traditional Democratic Party values.

The End Result of Neoliberal Economic Policies

Massive human misery on purpose, in order to enrich the greedy few even further.

Some food for thought:

That estimate is the end product of some complex data-crunching, and you can quibble with the details. Hey, maybe we’re only losing $800 billion a year. But the evidence is overwhelming that by failing to respond effectively to mass unemployment — by not even making unemployment a major policy priority — we’ve done ourselves immense long-term damage.

And it is, as I said, a bitter irony, because one main reason we’ve done so little about unemployment is the preaching of deficit scolds, who have wrapped themselves in the mantle of long-run responsibility — which they have managed to get identified in the public mind almost entirely with holding down government debt.

The reason neoliberals in both political parties won't address it is because they WANT America to be on the same level as the poorest of third world countries. Obama hasn't done shit about it, which tells you where his true loyalties are, and they aren't to traditional Democratic Party principles.

These people are evil sons of bitches.

Our Crooked Congress

CONGRESS is truly the enemy of the American people, and they don't even hide it anymore.

A truly crooked congressman wants to abolish food stamps thinking the poor are bums, yet he wants those farm subsidies to further enrich his coffers.

It is truly sickening:

Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies.

Given this awesome double standard — I don’t think the word “hypocrisy” does it justice — it seems almost anti-climactic to talk about facts and figures. But I guess we must.

So: Food stamp usage has indeed soared in recent years, with the percentage of the population receiving stamps rising from 8.7 in 2007 to 15.2 in the most recent data. There is, however, no mystery here. SNAP is supposed to help families in distress, and lately a lot of families have been in distress.

In fact, SNAP usage tends to track broad measures of unemployment, like U6, which includes the underemployed and workers who have temporarily given up active job search. And U6 more than doubled in the crisis, from about 8 percent before the Great Recession to 17 percent in early 2010. It’s true that broad unemployment has since declined slightly, while food stamp numbers have continued to rise — but there’s normally some lag in the relationship, and it’s probably also true that some families have been forced to take food stamps by sharp cuts in unemployment benefits.

Many, many people are getting food stamps and work but they don't make enough they can afford to pay for the food out of pocket.

Opponents are playing the class and race card while laughing at people's stupidity for falling for it.

Earth to Krugman

Quit defending that piece of shit in the White House. It gets tiresome after a while.

It doesn't matter whether the GOP would reject Obama's offers or not. The point is as a "Democrat" he is willing to sell "entitlements" down the river is the point. It is anathema to traditional Democratic Party principles.

Take a look at the record and try to argue with a straight face Obama is a Democrat.

It's all a bunch of theater anyway. The Republicans have gone into batshit crazy territory, while Obama is so far to the right he is bordering on being a fascist. The elites get what they want anyway regardless of the letter after somebody's name.

The Big "Deal"

Paul Krugman sees both good and bad about the "fiscal cliff" crap that was settled last night.

The good is the New Deal and Great Society programs are still alive for awhile, as long as Obama doesn't try and fritter them away at some future date, but the bad news is the revenue from those Bush tax cuts aren't made up:

So why the bad taste in progressives’ mouths? It has less to do with where Obama ended up than with how he got there. He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position. And his evident desire to have a deal before hitting the essentially innocuous fiscal cliff bodes very badly for the confrontation looming in a few weeks over the debt ceiling.

If Obama stands his ground in that confrontation, this deal won’t look bad in retrospect. If he doesn’t, yesterday will be seen as the day he began throwing away his presidency and the hopes of everyone who supported him.

What Paul doesn't seem to understand is Obama has NO USE for the people who voted for him; instead, his only constituencies are Wall Street and the financial elite.

The same constituencies to which the GOP panders.

Another Non-Fan of the Rumored "Agreement"

is Paul Krugman:

Also on the plus side, extended unemployment benefits and more infrastructure spending. But no payroll tax cut extension, which means a fairly big dose of austerity despite the deal.

But then there’s the Social Security cut.

Switching from the regular CPI to the chained CPI doesn’t affect benefits immediately after retirement, which are based on your past earnings.What it does mean is that after retirement your payments grow more slowly, about 0.3 percent each year. So if you retire at 65, your income at 75 would be 3 percent less under this proposal than under current law; at 85 it would be 6 percent less; there’s supposedly a bump-up in benefits for people who make it that far.

This is not good; there’s no good policy reason to be doing this, because the savings won’t have any significant impact on the underlying budget issues. And for many older people it would hurt. Also, the symbolism of a Democratic president cutting Social Security is pretty awful.

Which only means this piece of shit in the White House isn't a Democrat to begin with.

Will the Democrats in Congress support the American people or will they support this narcissistic shitbag?

It may be "cruel and stupid" to cut Social Security benefits, but Obama is brilliant, remember?

Of course he always was a stupid fuck whose megalomania always got in the way.

Monty Hall Politics

He better not do it, or it will be the end of the Democratic Party for good.

The "fiscal cliff" is a bunch of bullshit anyway. The government isn't going broke and can't go broke.

What this is all about is an ideological battle. We will see just how narcissistic Obama really is if he decides to sell the American people down the river in order to appease the 80 CEOs and Wall Street crooks to destroy the country in order to bail them out.

But one goal eluded the victors. Even though preliminary estimates suggest that Democrats received somewhat more votes than Republicans in Congressional elections, the G.O.P. retains solid control of the House thanks to extreme gerrymandering by courts and Republican-controlled state governments. And Representative John Boehner, the speaker of the House, wasted no time in declaring that his party remains as intransigent as ever, utterly opposed to any rise in tax rates even as it whines about the size of the deficit.

So President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.’s demands?

My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a “grand bargain” on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

Call their bluff and let the economy tank, if it comes to that. However, Bend Over Barry is sure to give them whatever they want in order that he can be seen not as a failed president, which he is, but some "transformative leader."

Austerity Is a Notion Whose Time Has Come and Gone

Nation after nation has been nearly ruined in order to satisfy the greed of the bankster class:

But the purveyors of conventional wisdom forgot that people were involved. Suddenly, Spain and Greece are being racked by strikes and huge demonstrations. The public in these countries is, in effect, saying that it has reached its limit: With unemployment at Great Depression levels and with erstwhile middle-class workers reduced to picking through garbage in search of food, austerity has already gone too far. And this means that there may not be a deal after all.

Much commentary suggests that the citizens of Spain and Greece are just delaying the inevitable, protesting against sacrifices that must, in fact, be made. But the truth is that the protesters are right. More austerity serves no useful purpose; the truly irrational players here are the allegedly serious politicians and officials demanding ever more pain.

The end game is to destroy all public services in order to enrich the banksters further. Unless, of course, it is stopped dead in its tracks.

Neoliberals Party Like It is 1931

while the rest of the world burns. ALL of the powers-that-be are still enthralled with Chicago School crackpot economics, or Friedmanism, to do one goddamned thing about it.

They won't, either, as the world economies collapse.

Rid the world of neoliberalism, the world economy has a chance. Don't rid it, and the world will rid of neoliberals.

It's that simple. It may very well take bloodshed before sanity reigns once again.

Krugman:

Why won’t the Fed act? My guess is that it’s intimidated by those Congressional Republicans, that it’s afraid to do anything that might be seen as providing political aid to President Obama, that is, anything that might help the economy. Maybe there’s some other explanation, but the fact is that the Fed, like the European Central Bank, like the U.S. Congress, like the government of Germany, has decided that avoiding economic disaster is somebody else’s responsibility.

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them.

And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread.

That's the way the neolibs want it. They want feudalism, which is the end game of all of this. They have all of the power and all of the money, while everybody else becomes slaves to them.

There WILL be bloodshed if and when that happens.

Austerity is a Con

It's all about ideology, not about improving the economy. Those of us who have followed the neoliberal frauds saw through them years and years ago.

Nothing new here:

So the austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs. And this is, of course, exactly the same thing that has been happening in America.

"I don't use it or need it, so why should I pay for it?" That is neoliberalism in a nutshell. They don't believe in anything called the common good.

News, Etc.

Governor Brown tells teachers they can go to hell and work until they die.

Since the average pension is about $1700 a month and teachers in that state do NOT pay into Social Security, the situation is extremely dire for them. Those teachers who paid into the system in other work are also given the shaft because their Social Security is reduced thanks to the "Windfall Elimination Provision."
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The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series, just in case you have been in a cave someplace.
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Whirlpool cuts 5,000 jobs, while others are waiting for the economy to go further in the ditch.

Again, you idiot neoliberals--it's the DEMAND, stupid.
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OF COURSE Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee, and he will be president thanks to Obama screwing things up so badly.
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This country should have followed Iceland's path and allowed the banks to go belly up.

The banks should have been made to fail and the banksters jailed.

We should NOT be bailing crooks out.

Paul, He Was Always Chicago School,

and therefore one should not be shocked the president doesn't give a flying fuck about what mainstream Democrats think and endorses the most right-wing economic policies imaginable.

link

He's not getting my vote next year. In fact, I have hardly paid any attention at all to the presidential contest because I figure one fascist is the same as the other.

One Can Talk,

as Paul Krugman does in this piece, about there being basically two sets of moralities when it comes to politics, but it boils down to just one thing: It's altruism versus selfishness. As of now, selfishness is running the show, and our country is on the verge of ruination because of it.

We have Ayn Rand and crackpot economist Milton Friedman to thank for this dismal state of affairs. They believed in some childish, utopian notion of "libertarianism." However, it doesn't exist and cannot exist as long as there are two people in the world.

Once upon a time, both political parties believed in the role of government in helping to rein in the worst tendencies of so-called "free markets." Now, though, you have idiots like Sharron Angle who think the very concept of government is illegitimate. Far from extreme, this is now "mainstream" GOP "thinking."

Republicans Like the Despicable Alan Simpson

absolutely WANT confrontation, and they will use the debt limit to absolutely fuck people over even more. They will threaten to close down the government if they don't get what they want.

You can bet your ass Obama will cave. You can't make nice with fascists, but Obama has been more than eager to join them.

Simpson may want a "bloodbath," but he may actually get far more than he bargained for in REAL bloodletting. Especially in the instance of millions upon millions of people being jobless.

The REAL Obama

Those of us who followed Obama very closely during the 2008 campaign KNEW he was far more supportive of Ronald Reagan and his "transformative" policies than he was of FDR. As Krugman points out in his blog post for today, Obama wasn't above peddling the right-wing smears of FDR.

link

It was there for all too see, but too many bought into the media hype this guy was the "change" candidate when in fact he was just as bad as any neolib Republican.

(H/T to commenter Mary Louise. That was an excellent catch.)

Because of Lamebrained "Anti-Government" Ideology,

we have structural unemployment, and because of this idiotic ideology, nobody wants to do anything about it.

The entire reason we are in this mess is because of this ideology. It needs to be thrown into the trash bin of history.

It's an excuse to do nothing, and it is completely unacceptable.

America is Just About Done For

When our politicians care more about the "needs" of the richest two percent (and actually a fraction of that two percent) more than repairing the deteriorating infrastructure or helping the unemployed, you know this country is truly fucked.

It's all based on ideology. All our politicians have to do is flush Friedmanism down the toilet and reverse course, and this country could be great once again.

But these people don't want that to happen.

How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.

The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.

Or ruin.

The Recent Bunning Stonewalling

and current GOP blackmailing of extended unemployment benefits in order to get in an estate tax "repeal" for people who don't need it just shows how absolutely dysfunctional the United States Senate truly is.

They don't care; they fucking don't care at ALL about the American people. They have theirs; everybody else can go to hell.

But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.