They Have Way Too Much Money, That's the Problem

There is no use trying to sugarcoat what is wrong with these billionaires and near-billionaires. They didn't get to where they are because they are more talented or more deserving than the rest of us. They just know how to game the system better than the rest of us. They can afford the armies of lawyers and accountants to game the system. They also can buy the politicians to carry out every single whim. And THAT is disastrous for the rest of us. These filthy rich do not know what's best for this country; virtually everything they and their fake think tanks and fake media and fake politicians propose is bad for the country.

When people have that much money, they get screwed up mentally. They get an entitlement mentality that they really ARE better than everybody else. However, to paraphrase what Clark Gable once said about acting and fame, they eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom like everybody else. There's nothing inherently special about these people; however THEY think they are special, and they want to make sure they keep exclusive club of specialness away from the riffraff, meaning the rest of us. They will destroy unions, demonize the poor and starve them, destroy the education system, and do everything else in their power to make sure the masses NEVER rise from what these sociopaths think is their lot in life.

The most dangerous billionaires of all are Bill Gates and Peter J. Peterson because they literally own the White House and control policy. Peterson is the one behind Obama's austerity shit that he attempted with Social Security and Medicare before Obama gave up on it, and Gates, well, he's just even more evil with his attempt to circumvent the law and destroy the public education system in this country for his own ends.

The Kochs are seditious bastards who should be locked up and their assets seized, but they are easy targets because they are so batshit crazy. Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and others are much worse because they appear to be so benign. They are as benign as cancerous tumors.

There's a Problem

When one says it has to take the anger of the middle class to change things around, there has to be a middle class LEFT in order to get angry.

The "middle class" or "working class" or whatever you call it has been hollowed out to the point there are fewer and fewer people left in it. You can thank Washington tax and economic policies which have created such an outrageous inequality of income.

Reich knows that without that outrage, revolution is sure to follow:

But it’s more likely they merely allowed all this to unfold, like a giant wet blanket over the outrage and indignation most Americans feel but don’t express.

Change is coming anyway. We cannot abide an ever-greater share of the nation’s income and wealth going to the top while median household incomes continue too drop, one out of five of our children living in dire poverty, and big money taking over our democracy.

At some point, working people, students, and the broad public will have had enough. They will reclaim our economy and our democracy. This has been the central lesson of American history.

Reform is less risky than revolution, but the longer we wait the more likely it will be the latter.

The Real Question in This Manufactured Crisis is Whether He Can Be Trusted

I say emphatically "no" because he has a history of "caving" to the opposition in some egotistical attempt to be a "transformative" president, i.e., nothing but a goddamned sellout and a fake put in there to fuck the rest of us over.

I will say he is not the sharpest knife in the drawer despite or because of his Ivy League pedigree.

Reich:

This time, though, Obama didn’t cave — at least, not yet.

The government is shuttered and the nation is on the verge of defaulting on its debts. But public opinion has turned sharply against the Republican Party. And the GOP’s corporate and Wall Street backers are threatening to de-fund it.

Suddenly the Republicans are acting like the school-yard bully who terrorized the playground but finally got punched in the face. They’re in shock. They’re humiliated. They’re trying to come up with ways of saving face.

We will see. The ball is in Bend Over Barry's court.

I still say it is nothing but a bunch of political theater designed to force "austerity" down the throats of the American people.

I hope I am wrong, but I am rarely wrong when it comes to this piece of shit of a president.

The Kochs and Their Ilk Belong in Prison for Sedition

I am NOT joking about this. They are evil beyond belief, and they do NOT care about this country at all.

The biggest problem with this shutdown shit is Obama because Obama CANNOT be trusted to do the right thing. I fear him even more than the Kochs because he has repeatedly try to make nice with these criminals, these fascists, and you can't make nice with them.

Reich:

Their game plan is to not just to take over the Republican Party. It's to take over America. The showdown over the budget and the debt ceiling is a prelude to 2016, when they plan to run Texas Senator Ted Cruz for President. (Cruz, if you haven't noticed, is busily establishing his creds as the biggest flamer in Washington -- orchestrating not only the current extortion but also the purge of reasonable Republicans from the GOP.) Obama and the Democrats must not give in. They shouldn't even negotiate with extortionists. As I learned the hard way, giving in to bullies just encourages them to escalate their demands. The president gave in at the end of 2011 when Republican bullies threatened to go over the fiscal cliff and take the rest of the nation with them. At that time they demanded spending cuts. Now they want to repeal a law they detest. If we give in again, what's next? A coup d'etat?

Miscellaneous

When you're a failed president, you engage in distractions like Syria.
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Swimming great Diana Dyad is about to reach shore in her marathon swim from Cuba to Florida (keys).

link

She is 64 years old.

User Fee America

Thanks to neoliberalism's twisted "philosophy" to justify unbridled greed and parasitism of the tiny elite at the expense of everybody else, the "public good" isn't even mentioned anymore though it is absolutely crucial for a stable society.

Reich's paragraph sums up the decline of the United States in the last paragraph:

We’re losing public goods available to all, supported by the tax payments of all and especially the better-off. In its place we have private goods available to the very rich, supported by the rest of us.

People Are Pissed Off,

but unfortunately that being pissed off isn't being put to good use. Thanks to the magnificent propaganda put forward by the elites to divert attention away from the grand larceny they are pulling on the American people, people are focusing on inconsequential social issues to the detriment of their freedom and standard of living.

It's worked for decades, and people still haven't figured out the charade:

When average people feel the game is rigged, they get angry. And that anger can easily find its way into deep resentments — of the poor, of blacks, of immigrants, of unions, of the well-educated, of government.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Demagogues throughout history have used anger to target scapegoats — thereby dividing and conquering, and distracting people from the real sources of their frustrations.

Make no mistake: The savage inequality America is experiencing today is deeply dangerous.

The Blame Rests Squarely on Washington,

not with "unskilled" workers or, according to the new mantra peddled by Wall Street crooks and globalist cultists, technology has decimated the American workforce and nothing can be done about it. The politicians, including Obama, are so enamored with the discredited and debunked neoliberal ideology and have been so bought off by the crooks who benefit from it, they are willing to destroy the American economy to do it.

This economy is being deliberately killed by Washington politics. Period.

link

Economic determinists — fatalists, really — assume that globalization and technological change must now condemn a large portion of the American workforce to under-unemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best eductions and connections with ever higher wages and wealth. And therefore that the only way to get good jobs back and avoid widening inequality is to withdraw from the global economy and become neo-Luddites, destroying the new labor-saving technologies.

That’s dead wrong. Economic isolationism and neo-Ludditism would reduce everyone’s living standards. Most importantly, there are many ways to create good jobs and reduce inequality.

Other nations are doing it. Germany was generating higher real median wages until recently, before it was dragged down by austerity it imposed the European Union. Singapore and South Korea continue to do so. Chinese workers have been on a rapidly-rising tide of higher real wages for several decades. These nations are implementing national economic strategies to build good jobs and widespread prosperity. The United States is not.

Any why not? Both because we don’t have the political will to implement them, and we’re trapped in an ideological straightjacket that refuses to acknowledge the importance of such a strategy. The irony is we already have a national economic strategy but it’s been dictated largely by powerful global corporations and Wall Street. And, not surprisingly, rather than increase the jobs and wages of most Americans, that strategy has been increasing the global profits and stock prices of these giant corporations and Wall Street banks.

Robert Reich will have no seat at the "Democratic" administration table, let me tell you.

Because, Bob, We Have the Worst President on Record

The economy continues to be in the shitter, and it is all by design. One can't continue to blame Bush II the for the problems--the economy is all Obama's baby now, and he has no intention of doing one damned thing about it.

We have a depression here for all intents and purposes--NOT a recovery. Obama is doing the job his masters like Robert Rubin always wanted him to do.

You don't have to subscribe to conspiracies to know his run for the presidency was a "plot" right out of the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. He was never vetted by the media yet pushed 24/7. He was yammering right-wing talking points about cutting entitlements and privatizing public education while running for president and singing the praises of Ronald Reagan, just for starters, but few people saw the warning signs. He had no real national political experience to speak of--his term in the U.S. Senate wasn't anything notable, and his 2004 Democratic convention keynote address wasn't anything to write home about--yet he was being peddled as the next Lincoln, FDR, JFK, MLK all wrapped in one package.

I tried to warn people on this blog and elsewhere this guy was little more than a ringer, a fraud, but nobody listened.

Now the question remains WHO initially bankrolled his candidacy. I don't think it was just the Chicago machine or EVEN the Chicago machine. Somebody selected him for the purpose of destroying the Democratic Party from within. I mean, this is outright destruction of the party, not little chipping away at the edges like Clinton and others. The fact he is African American effectively neutralizes any opposition from that constituency despite his policies doing nothing but HARM to that constituency. The fact he has a "D" after his name effectively neutralizes opposition within his own party for his brazenly right-wing policies (the most right-wing in American history).

SOMEBODY was behind this. Rubin I think is one likely suspect, but there have to be others.

Note to Robert Reich: Obama Doesn't Care

All Obama cares about is his place in history, and he will destroy the legacy of the Democratic Party in order to do it.

My utter hatred and contempt for Obama in terms of his policies knows no bounds. Just when you think he scrapes bottom, he does some other outrage to outdo himself.

He really is the worst president in American history, bar none.

Reich:

For over thirty years Republicans have pitted the middle class against the poor, preying on the frustrations and racial biases of average working people who can’t get ahead no matter how hard they try. In the Republican narrative, government takes from the hard-working middle and gives to the undeserving and dependent needy.

In reality, average working people have been stymied because almost all the economic gains of the last three decades have gone to the very top. The middle has lost bargaining power as unions have shriveled. American politics has been flooded with campaign contributions from corporations and the wealthy, which have used their clout to reduce marginal tax rates, widen loopholes, loosen regulations, gain subsidies, and obtain government bailouts when their bets turn sour.

Obama hasn't done shit, and WON'T do shit, about this situation because he is really one of them.

More About Obama's Continual Sellout of the American People

This piece is from Robert Reich. Don't even try and persuade me that Obama isn't trying to force a right-wing ideology on America while trying to lay the blame on the Tea Party types:

What is the President’s response? He still wants a so-called “grand bargain” of “balanced” spending cuts (including cuts in the projected growth of Social Security and Medicare) combined with tax increases on the wealthy. So far, though, he has agreed to a gross imbalance — $1.5 trillion in cuts to Republicans’ $600 billion in tax increases on the rich.

The President apparently believes Republicans are serious about deficit reduction, when in fact the Tea Partiers now running the GOP are serious only about dismembering the government.

And he seems to accept that the budget deficit is the largest economic problem facing the nation, when in reality the largest problem is continuing high unemployment (some 20 million Americans unemployed or under-employed), declining real wages, and widening inequality. Deficit reduction now or in the near-term will only make these worse.

Obama believes in dismembering government, too, so don't kid yourself on that, Bob. His blathering about "public-private partnerships" was a key to his real beliefs. Just take a look at his disastrous education policies for proof.

Obama is a stupid, narcissistic shit bought and paid for by the same types who control the Republicans. The LAST thing we need is somebody in the White House who has an inflated sense of his place in history.

I am sure he is STILL consulting with historians to see how he fares against other presidents in the history of the United States. By "presidents" I mean Washington, Lincoln, and his idol Ronald Reagan rather than presidents he most resembles like Buchanan, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and Bush II.

It's the Demand, Stupid

It doesn't take half a brain to know that the neoliberal "dream" of a race to the bottom for almost everybody with a tiny group of rich who have all the money is NOT sustainable.

However, the vast majority of people in D.C. politics DON'T have even a half a brain, and that's why this country is on the ropes.

No jobs, no demand for goods and services. No demand for goods and services, even fewer jobs. Even less demand, fewer jobs still.

Henry Ford understood that demand is what drives the economy, but these idiots who are killing this country refuse to see the obvious:

Last year, President Obama agreed to $1.5 trillion of spending cuts, which have already begun.

Unless Republicans and Democrats reach a budget agreement before next Friday, another $85 billion of spending cuts go into effect this year. They’ll begin almost immediately.

With consumers and government both spending less, businesses won’t hire more workers; they’ll fire more workers. That’s likely to happen in coming months.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to understand all this. But apparently many in Washington don’t have half a brain.

"Austerity" bullshit makes it worse. Obama, however, doesn't give a shit about the American people, only about his backers on Wall Street.

If there is a worse or more destructive president out there in the last century, I'd like to know who it is. Not even our beloved Bush and Cheney were that damned bad. That's only because the Democrats in Congress actually acted like Democrats and kept them in check, not like the fawning sycophants they are with Obama.

Etc.

Nightmare at 30,000 feet: Mitt should know better than ask a stupid question like this.

Furthermore, how many dolts have died up in the Himalayas because of altitude sickness? Many, and it doesn't take much to die up there.
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Speaking of which, it is still possible Romney could pull it off, especially if the economy remains shitty with few jobs being created.

The problem is, it is very difficult for him to turn it around now that early voting has begun in many states across the U.S.
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More Mitt: Unlike FDR and JFK, who were traitors to their class (and their families hated as a result by the rich), Mitt is just the opposite:

Money means power. Concentrated wealth at the top means extraordinary power at the top. The reason Romney pays a rate of only 14 percent on $13 million of income in 2011 — a lower rate than many in the middle class — is because he exploits a loophole that allows private equity managers to treat their income as capital gains, taxed at only 15 percent.

And that loophole exists solely because private equity and hedge fund managers have so much political clout — as a result of their huge fortunes and the money they’ve donated to political candidates — that neither party will remove it.

In other words, everything America is learning about Mitt Romney — his tax returns, his years at Bain Capital, the video of his speech to high-end donors in which he belittles half of America, his gaffes, the budget policies he promotes — repeat and reenforce the same underlying reality.

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Mitt can't be trusted regarding China.

Lots of conflicts of interest there.

What the Real Battle Is in This Election

Robert Reich says it's the "regressives versus the progressives":

The Reason There is the Decline of the Public Good

is because there has been the rise of an ideology which says all public institutions must be abolished because they are public. The reason for this ideology is that it is backed by the very interests that benefits more from the public good than everybody else, but they don't want their tax dollars going out there to help everybody else.

In other words, it is an ideology based on pure greed and selfishness.

Thanks to the Insanity

spewed by the likes of crackpot "economist" Milton Friedman and politicians of his stripe, the United States of America, including the middle class, is on its knees and headed for almost certain disaster.

It's because too few people have too much money and manufacturing, absolutely essential for a country's survival, has been "outsourced."

This is totally insane. Henry Ford knew a century ago that in order to make money in industry, workers have to make enough money to buy the products they make.

Bob Herbert:

With those coping mechanisms now exhausted, it’s painfully obvious that the economy has failed working Americans.

There was plenty of growth, but the economic benefits went overwhelmingly — and unfairly — to those already at the top. Mr. Reich cites the work of analysts who have tracked the increasing share of national income that has gone to the top 1 percent of earners since the 1970s, when their share was 8 percent to 9 percent. In the 1980s, it rose to 10 percent to 14 percent. In the late-’90s, it was 15 percent to 19 percent. In 2005, it passed 21 percent. By 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, the richest 1 percent were taking more than 23 percent of all income.

The richest one-tenth of 1 percent, representing just 13,000 households, took in more than 11 percent of total income in 2007.

Nobody in his or her right mind can justify this. The imbalance is so great, we are on the verge of bloodshed in this country.

Robert Reich, In His Closing Remarks of This Post,

nails what is the real problem with this economy:

The reality is this: Big American companies may never rehire large numbers of workers. And they won’t even begin to think about hiring until they know American consumers will buy their products. The problem is, American consumers won’t start buying again until they know they have reliable paychecks.

No end in sight, either, out of this mess.

Wall Street Mess

According to Robert Reich, the Dodd bill is a step in the right direction but it leaves some important things out in order to prevent another Wall Street meltdown. Reich names three critical reforms that are necessary:

1. Require that trading of all derivatives be done on open exchanges where parties have to disclose what they’re buying and selling and have enough capital to pay up if their bets go wrong. The exception in the current bill for so-called “unique” derivatives opens up a loophole big enough for bankers to drive their Ferrari’s through.

2. Resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act in its entirety so commercial banks are separated from investment banks. The current bill doesn’t go nearly far enough. Commercial banks should take deposits and lend money. Investment banks should be limited to the casino we call the stock market, helping companies issue new issues and making bets. Nothing good comes of mixing the two. We learned this after the Great Crash of 1929, and then forgot it in 1999 when Congress allowed financial supermarkets to do both.

3. Cap the size of big banks at $100 billion in assets. The current bill doesn’t limit the size of banks at all. It creates a process for winding down the operations of any bank that gets into trouble. But if several big banks are threatened, as they were when the housing bubble burst, their failure would pose a risk to the whole financial system, and Congress and the Fed would surely have to bail them out. The only way to ensure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big, period. Nobody has been able to show any scale efficiencies over $100 billion in assets, so that should be the limit.

Robert Reich

engages in the usual stuff saying the jobs will "never" come back--not really because they can't, but because our bought-and-paid-for "elected officials" WON'T do a damned thing about it--and how a college education supposedly shields workers from the work force because I doubt the unemployment rate of college grads is "only" 5 percent. Anyway, he does make some good points:

These cost-cutting moves have allowed many companies to show profits notwithstanding relatively poor sales. Alcoa, for example, had $1.5 billion in cash at the end of last year, double what it had on hand at the end of 2008. It managed this largely by cutting 28,000 jobs, 32% of its work force. But for workers, there’s no return. Those who have lost their jobs to foreign outsourcing or labor-replacing technologies are unlikely ever to get them back. And they have little hope of finding new jobs that pay as well. More than 40% of today’s unemployed have been without work for over six months, a higher proportion than at any time in 60 years.

The only way many of today’s jobless are likely to retain their jobs or get new ones is by settling for much lower wages and benefits. The official unemployment numbers hide the extent to which American workers are already on this downward path. But if you look at income data you’ll see the drop.

Obama and "Democrats" cheer this shit on, of course.

All Free Markets are Equal, but Some are More Equal Than Others

Welcome to the new "free market" era for those on Main Street as they are left to defend themselves while Wall Street gets all kinds of government handouts:

Washington is paralyzed by snow and partisanship. Nothing is getting done – even as the Great Recession pulls more Americans into its maw.

In the midst of this paralysis, the President was asked about the giant pay packages of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co. ($17 mullion for 2009) and Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs ($9 million). “First of all, I know both those guys,” Obama said. “They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”

Free market system? As I remember it, American taxpayers forked out hundreds of billions to keep JPMorgan, Goldman, and other big Wall Street banks afloat through most of 2009. Had we not done so, Dimon, Blankfein, and most other top executives on Wall Street would not have earned a dime last year. In fact, some would be out on the street, reather than sitting pretty on the Street.

The free market system has been unleashed instead on average Americans. According to real-estate data firm First American CoreLogic, about one-fourth of American households with a mortgage are under water – owing more on their homes than their homes are worth. Mortgage-bond trader Amherst Securities estimates that 7.1 million of the 7.9 households now behind on their mortgage payments will lose their homes to foreclosure if nothing is done to modify their loans. Already cities and towns are littered with foreclosure sales, pulling down the values of all homes in the area.