Wednesday, July 27, 2011

One thing for sure about the US DEBT Crisis is that in the long term there is no question that THE PUBLIC WANTS BALANCE! From a recent editorial in the Philadelphi Inquirer**********"At this late hour, chances for a "grand" bargain that would stabilize the nation's finances for the long term by using a mix of deep spending cuts and modest new revenues are almost nil. At best, it looks as if Congress will instead produce a short-term fix, which allows this disruptive and economically destabilizing political fight to drag on. The persistent uncertainty over whether the government can pay its debt and other bills has placed in jeopardy the world's best credit rating and threatens to drag down the economy by raising interest rates. Those higher rates will act as a tax increase by driving up what Americans pay for mortgages, car loans and credit cards." http://www.mailtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/OPINION/107270311

18 comments:

  1. I believe the people who voted for the tea bagger obstructionist are beginning to see their mistake...but probably not those people are totally unreasonable and never learn from any experience...I wish all tea baggers would just do us all a favor and move to some country where they would feel better about their government.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's a short list to find a country which doesn't have a government and which can still be called a country.

    Somalia comes to mind - then again, they might like it there; it's a (1) theocracy which (2) hates America....

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think so too, Mike. There is a fever about these people and their rhetoric that denies a basic reality--that the majority of Americans want government to function by having everybody ante up and get in the game. The "wag the dog" notion of economics (that what is good for the top 2 percent of income holders is all that matters in all situations) is a smoke screen.

    No matter how much media power an entity has, sooner or later people of ordinary means and desires will see they are being played.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Good analogy.

    Yes when you think of countries that have no infastructure other than military one you get countries like (1) Somalia or (3) Pakistan.

    Tea Party Land is not where most people live or would choose to live, but they are about to pay a visit to the place and find that out.

    Those who just "didn't get it" in 2010 hopefully will be older and wiser next time out.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I believe that this next time shall be much different. I am not going to brain drain myself tonight it would be interesting Doug to see a graph on where this all stands. Up here in Canada I subscribe to stats Canada but they are always two months behind. But it would be interesting to see some graphs within all of this as each day at night I will use this copernic pro which I mentioned and one really has to do their homework - I find that I can understand this as much better by way of audio or within a graphical manner as you have some scholars or very smart people that do know what they write about before they write about it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Tonight I have been reading all of my subscription here and Doug I would like to post a few things of that in which I am reading.

    The PM as of today:

    http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/video/video-harper-calls-us-debt-crisis-complicated/article2111790/

    I shall contribute some more as this is no longer an awakening.
    If you wish I shall send you a program tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete
  7. It is very complicated Jack. I wouldn't wish this mess on the folks who send their reps to Ottowa.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't know if your on Doug but isn't there a conditional clause with the Constitution whereby the President in fact can make a decision much like with the clause in which entitles a President to pass a bill in times of war. I could be wrong but I do believe there is however the only downside to this is that the President can be impeached if it's desired after the action is done.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I'm balding over this as well....or just getting a little grayer the last time I checked.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Almost nil and absolute nil are two different things. I keep hoping they will put their petty bickering aside and work together to correct the problem.

    ReplyDelete
  11. There is talk of Obama raising the debt limit under a clause in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That's being downplayed for the moment by the White House.

    ReplyDelete
  12. You and me both Fred. I'm afraid there is a faction in the GOP that is trying to out-Reagan Reagan. The voters in next year's GOP Primaries will have to sort out what kind of party they want. Obama has already offered to put Medicare-age eligibility up two years and offered federal spending cuts at 3 dollars for every one dollar in closed tax loopholes and raised revenue.

    And still the tea party won't take the deal.

    They would rather wound the whole economy than risk closing a single tax loophole for the rich. This tells me a lot of this group do not represent the interests of the middle class or even the upper-middle class in most areas. If we default a lot of 401ks could be blasted just as they were coming back, and credit card and mortgage rates are going to go up--for everybody.

    The tea party and guys like Boehner and Cantor see Obama as weak after losing so many seats in the last election and they want to roll him. One of the reasons I think Obama lost so many seats is that voters expected he and the Democrats in Congress could make the recession start to go away in a year or two, like a regular recession.
    But this is not an ordinary recession.

    Corporate lobbying in the 90's led to massive federal deregulation, and the rise in deregulated over-the-counter derivatives (bets for and against a bond) , robo-mortgages dreamed up by Countrywide and other big mortgage giants, all have hurt the economy.

    All these toxic mortgages were given phony credit ratings that were too high because the companies paid the rating agencies to look the other way. "Bad paper" wrapped up in "securitization bonds" that were sold all over the world.

    This has led to to huge losses in the housing and financial industry when the bubble burst in 2008.

    A lot of this "self-correcting markets" stuff peddled by guys like Alan Greenspan and Clinton's old gang at the Treasury Department (Bob Rubin and Larry Summers) is and was bogus. It was similar to what this nation already went through in the Great Depression, and it helped bring about the Second World War.

    Both far right-Republicans and Clinton Democrats forgot the lessons of the 1930's . Now we are paying the piper for it in my humble opinion.

    I' m not a business MBA or anything, but I don't think we can bargain with a faction who says, basically, "give me all I want and I don't ask me to give any ground."

    That's why I think most of blame has to go to the tea party zealots. They may be madder and more stubborn but that doesn't make them right in this. The bigthing Obama wants one vote instead of two on the deficit ceiling. That's reasonable considering all he has put on the table already.

    ReplyDelete
  13. The IMF and World Bank agenda to destroy state welfare spending is a global problem that afflicts us all. The artificially created and manipulated 'credit crunch' is I believe a deliberate policy to impoverish the populations of the world to the benefit of the corporations and the elitist oligarchy that control them.

    We are all under attack by the same gangsters and banksters it is now the global populations against the transnational corporations and their agents in government, industry and commerce.

    The Obama regime has shown itself unfit for purpose, but there are no alternatives to the republicrat consensus that controls the federal government and the only hope for the populations of the United States (like the UK and Europe) is a form of Balkanisation, or at least 'subsidiarity' whereby both individual states and alliances of states must secede from the Union and end that disastrous Enlightenment experiment once and for all. The US one party state is founded upon the fallacy that it is a two party system (the same is true in the UK) so in my opinion the populations of both countries must abolish that illusory sense of nationhood and both the US and the UK must be de-united and political power devolved to the regions.

    The power of the corporate new world order and the globalizing gangster capitalism whose interests it serves means that the notion of the nation state is already illusory, an essential deception that only gives rise to self defeating (for the populations) divide and rule strategies and idiotic patriotism based on nothing whatsoever, pure fantasy and nonsense that obscures the reality of our situation, which in my opinion is that there is one world, one human population, one ecology, that is to say one nature and one culture and everything else is just a dream.

    America should cease to exist because in reality it doesn't really exist anyway except as an idea and a highly destructive one at that.

    So far as I can see there is no political answer to the problem as it stands, the US is both a failed state and failed empire, never was the need to think globally but to act locally more necessary than it is today amid the death throes of the Anglo-American empire and ongoing collapse of global capitalism

    ReplyDelete
  14. LOL.

    I hear the surfing there is out of this world, AA...better than the north shore of Hawaii's Oahu actually.

    It's legal to kiss a goat there as well.

    ReplyDelete
  15. The banksters and the other stock-bond are indeed the powerful forces that do want to exaserbate the economic problems caused by their own institutions and there collective control over Washington as an excuse to create the great misery. These casino capitalists are fools who will, as someone once said, sell the very rope to hang themselves with--but only after they have created so much misery.

    I hoped we in the USA were turning a corner after the 2008 elections, AA. But it seems Gore Vidal's idea that the United States was a one-party corporate state in disquise as a pluralist nation has more value than ever before. There are actually quite a few politicians I believe who are doing a level-best job to look after the needs of the nation. But they are still just a few and not likely to become a majority as long as the deep south states drag us down.

    I'm more pesimistic than ever that the USA can continue as a fifty-state federal model. It is clear that the political culture in parts of Texas and all of South Carolina, to cite two examples, make it such that it would be best if they went their own way and take whatever former states who wish to become satellite nations with them.

    If it comes to this, may it be done peacefully and letthose in the minority of these states find refuge with us who truly want to see a pluralistic nation with a mixed public/private economy dedicated to the betterment of all.

    ReplyDelete
  16. I can only wholeheartedly concur Doug that a continent cannot really be a country in any meaningful sense. This land is their land and that other land over there is their land too, the vast majority of us don't own very much (if any) land at all.

    The United States in some fundamental sense doesn't really exist, it was tried like Yugoslavia was and like Yugoslavia it failed for much the same reasons, the rich and powerful undermined it for more riches and more power, multinational, transcontinental, global, extraterrestrial, space weapon superpower, for which Flash Gordon is the role model, it was always going to hit the buffers it was just a question of time.

    Meanwhile back in Gotham City the only competition was for who would run penal colony and who would populate it?

    In the middle of this sci-fi, mafiosi soap opera, face lifted, PR extravaganza, the plastic surgery democracy treated the creators of all this fabulous bounty with absolute and utter contempt, played with them, used them for pleasure and profit and told them that they were the envy of the world.

    The bubble had to burst and now we are still reeling from the September 2001 putsch of the casino capital mob when Ming the Merciless, evil ruler of the Planet Mongo (also known as Dick Cheney) bellowed out the mantra 'full spectrum dominance' and we are now all suffering the consequences, even in Texas and South Carolina I suspect too.

    But yes Doug the only reality lies in thinking globally and acting locally, the Union must be given up for dead, there must be closure, lessons leaned and then it seems to me, it is time to move on as one human race, one nature and one blue planet (so far as we know for certain)....why would we pay alleged 'debts' we never actually incurred, to whom exactly?.. What a very silly idea that is.

    ReplyDelete
  17. By coincidence I happened to be thinking about the Yugoslavian model last night, AA. While grounded in a different history and subject to different predatory states and empires around it, there is some sense that America seems to exist only as a unified nation in times of crisis. Otherwise, like Bosnians, Croats and Serbs and the like, we go at each other with less and less common ground.

    If the crisis of a real or hyped external threat is removed, we set in upon ourselves as it were, channeling unease. Hard economic times like these make me feel we are already living in two or three separate balkanized nations.

    One of the nations suffers from unemployment and underemployment and worries about the future of its children. Another nation seeks to lower the tax base to sixty-year lows (against the GDP) and continues to seek economic opportunities beyond the borders of the nation. Another part of the nation is reactionary-populist and wants nothing to do with Washington or its "bureaucrats", apparently believing that unelected corporate executives know what best for the rest of us.

    Gary Wills in his important 1999 book on understanding politics over here, "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government", summed up the latter "nation" quite well, a full decade before its current incarnation as the "tea party".

    The tradition of regarding government as somehow best scorned is, Wills writes, " a tradition that belittles America..that asks us to love our country by hating our government, that turns our founding fathers into unfounders, that glamorizes frontier settlers in order to demean what they settled, that obliges us to despise the very people we vote for."


    While professing American patriotism, the multi-nationals (and their foootsoldiers in the reactionary fringes and pockets of the heartland in America) seek to withdraw from supporting the USA in creating private-sector jobs or allowing the government to invest at the levels of education and infrastructure needed to bring Main Street America out of its slump.

    Speaking of penal colonies: the state of California--once one of the greatest economic engines in the world, not just the USA, in the now spends more of its economy locking people up than in both its University and State University systems combined! 1.3 billion was taken out of education last year. Does this bode well for the future?

    In effect this alliance between anti-public sector cosmopolitan big-business officers and the perpetually cynical anti-revenue patriots of all ranks (who think anyone paying taxes is a victim) have already torn the nation asunder in ways that any rival foreign power or terrorist group in the world could only dream about.

    ReplyDelete