j_b

The Great American Bubble Machine Matt Taibbi on how Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet. The Great American Bubble Machine

Whatever. It's a quite a bit like having an argument with a 4th grader.

If you weren't a dimwitt, you'd have noticed that 100% of my bashing is aimed at unfettered capitalism. I have no problem whatsoever with private property, entrepreneurship, etc ... but lots of problems with morons who think that having the Waltons owning as much as the bottom 100 millions americans is a sign that freedom is on the march.

Good. It's a little long, unfortunately.

Are you talking to me? because I don't believe I have ignored any point you made.

Yes, regressive taxes in the form of sales tax, nickle and dime fees and registrations, etc .. all the while republicans claimed to lower taxation. Aren't you proud of them?

i have read about it in the economist and wsj, time, newsweek etc. even back in the '90's. You may be a particular discerning reader but the editorial line and >~98% of the articles published in these publications didn't say anyhting other than everything is fine, the economy is growing, inflation is reasonable, unemployment is at structural level, cheap credit is great, let's consume some more. I won't have you do the work but I'd be really curious to see the articles you claim discussed the decrease in real income for most americans because besides the work of academics (and Johnston in the media), I really don't see anybody doing it. It's not a secret but it certainly was not the line sold to the public by the media and politicians until quite recently. It's rather interesting that would confuse establishing facts absent from the cultural landscape with anything else, little less ideology. What to do about it? imo it's a deep structural crisis. The real economy has been mostly dead for 40 years because it is based on a depleting resource, and rather than retool, elites have chosen to continue with geopolitical games to control the resource and dead-end consumerism. The way out of it, if there is way, is efficiency, research and development, rebuilding local economies, etc .. i just don't buy that: see above. as far as cheap credit goes, an amazing amount of it was used to fuel consumerism, not simply to "stay afloat". Once most families are done with paying mortgage, healthcare, food, childcare, transportation and communication, there isn't all that much left for consumerism. I don't believe in the beamer and satellite dish in the driveway of every pauper described in the article cited in my original post. "dominant culture" portrayal of "economic reality"? what does that mean? "dominant culture" is the message relayed by the corporate media. I assume you know what protrayal means. And "economic reality" is the sustaining of consumption (~70% of GDP) by cheap credit while real wages didn't keep up the cost of living. Come on. Not everyone ignored the various bubbles of the last 30 years. The media and the politicains ignored them until they burst. again, refer above. easy credit fueled consumerism without a doubt. i think your scenario about the poor indebted american needing loans and credit cards to survive might apply to a small minority of people (not to be discounted), but is not the general reality. The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=12620 "Elizabeth Warren a Harvard Law professor, and author of the Two Income Trap, has been studying the middle class over an entire generation. She's been comparing spending patterns of a typical family with two kids today (data from 2005-2006) and a generation ago ie in the 1970's and is warning of the coming collapse of the Middle Class. Her presentation at UC in 2007 summarizes her research that shows that over a generation, a typical family is now spending less of their family income on clothing (down 32%), food (down 18%), per car ownership costs (down 24%) and appliances (down 52%), but is spending far more on Child Care (up 100%), Mortgage Payments (up 76%), Health Insurance (up 74%), the second or third car (up 52%) and all sorts of taxes (up 25%)" [video:youtube]akVL7QY0S8A

News flash, moron: Obama has been president since January. Those June unemployment numbers belong exclusively to Obama-brand class warfare. But I'm sure once Cap and Trade legislation is signed their job prospects will brighten. I am bemused at being called a moron by someone who claims that 6 months should be enough to inverse the trend in a cratering economy and a financial crash such as we have seen in more than 60 years.

I have. And I'm not interested in working an extra ten hours per week for the rest of my life because you, j_b, and Prole can't manage your personal finances. In June alone, another 450,000 laid off people just lost their capacity to handle any level of debt, jackass. Where these people supposed to not believe anything they heard from Bush, the guy you voted for twice, and his media lapdogs over the last 8 years?

i'm not quite sure if anything has been "hidden from sight", as you say; i've read somewhat regularly about wealth distribution in main-stream zines (although you do say it has been hidden from people by "indebting" them, which i can't say i understand). Before the last 9 mos or so, which mainstream zines have discussed the incredible change in wealth distribution and lowering of real income for most americans that have occurred starting with Reagan (actually Carter)? Which mainstream zines (or politicians for that matter) exactly wasn't spewing the trickle down non-sense and rising tide that lifts all boats crapola? You don't understand how most people don't even know their real wage has decreased over the last 30 years even though most have been had to used cheap credit extensively to stay afloat? I'd like to say I don't understand it either but believe it has to do with the false portrayal of economic reality and value of real-estate assets by dominant culture as orchestrated by the corporate media. What choice? Be poor and living poorly without debt or be poor and living well fed with debt? Most people would rather bury their head in the sand than acknowledge pauperization.

You better watch out or the commies will redistribute it all away ...

It especially seems contradictory since the "economy" is usually taken to be the GDP. But, imo, that is a minor point of the article compared to the issue of the distribution of wealth worthy of the age of the robber barons and how it has been hidden from sight by indebting people (and making a killing in the process).

Even the corporate media occasionally let the truth slip out Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret By Ben Funnell Financial Times Published: June 30 2009 19:14 Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression. The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite. The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all. According to Société Générale economists, the inflation-adjusted income of the highest-paid fifth of US earners has risen by 60 per cent since 1970, while it has fallen by more than 10 per cent for the rest. As was recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, the Walton family, of Wal-Mart fame, is wealthier than the bottom third of the US population put together – about 100m people. These are staggering statistics, confirmed by measures such as the US and UK’s ever-rising Gini coefficients, which estimate income disparity. Another way of putting this is that the share of profits in gross domestic product is at a 100-year high, or was until very recently. Put simply, the benefits of economic growth have gone into the pockets of plutocrats rather than the bulk of the population. So why has there been no revolution? Because there was a solution: debt. If you couldn’t earn it, you could borrow it. Cheap financing was made widely available. Financial innovations such as the asset-backed securities market aided this process, as did government-sponsored agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Regulators welcomed it all while perhaps taking insufficient account of the moral hazard problem it posed: that ever-increasing leverage meant the authorities had to keep interest rates low, otherwise the debt burden would cripple consumption. This prompted more leverage, which exacerbated the problem. A walk in any low-income area in the UK confirms this. There are BMWs in the driveways, satellite dishes on the roofs and furniture delivery vans on the streets. In both Britain and America the jobless were encouraged to buy their own homes. No one begrudges anyone else the right to own a home or buy luxury goods. The problem is that the luxuries need to be paid for out of earnings and the houses out of equity topped up with an affordable amount of debt. More (with subscription): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e23c6d04-659d-11de-8e34-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1

All we need is more delusional conservative fearmongering which assumes that common folks (including jackasses like Fairweather) have anything worth "redistributing": let's not talk about living wage but rather how the "commies" are going to take your scraps away. Note that once again an authoritarian like Fairweather, who only days ago cheered the military take over of Honduran democracy, wraps himself in the mantle of "freedom"

It's too little too late to avoid some of the catastrophic aspects of climate change (corresponding to a temp. increase much greater than 2degC): - There is little 'cap' and it is mostly 'trade'. Polluters will be able to trade their emissions or buy offsets via obscure schemes in developping nations - no reduction in GHG emissions relative to 1990 (the IPCC reference) until ~2025 - EPA is stripped of its autority to regulate emissions - Trading of carbon credits is modeled after the subprime trading market - goals in renewable are under what would be achieved with current market dynamics - loads of dough for oxymoronic "clean coal"

Published on Thursday, July 2, 2009 by Consortium News Who Sits at the Health-Reform Table? by Tom Klammer President Obama held a town hall on Health Care Reform last week, broadcast nationwide on ABC with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. Once again, even though a majority of the public and now even a majority of doctors in the US favor a single-payer system, single payer was still off the table. The president of the AMA, which opposes single payer, nowadays representing about a 19 percent minority of doctors, was prominently on display. Ron Williams, CEO of Aetna, the health insurance company that in the 1850’s provided insurance to slave holders for their slaves, was part of the discussion too. In 2007, Ron Williams received $19,924,027.00 in total compensation as CEO of that health insurance company. But the part of the healthcare problem that caught my eye was a woman in a bright yellow jacket, seated on the front row in the East Room of the White House. "Dr. Gail Wilensky, who ran Medicare in the Bush Administration," gushed ABC's Diane Sawyer by way of introduction. Wilensky (the Dr. in front of her name is for a PhD in economics, not a degree in medicine) got to ask the last question in the prime-time portion of the show, right before the late-night news. She tossed out some big numbers and asked "What do we do in ways that CBO will count so that we can actually get everybody covered?" It is worth noting here that CBO, the Congressional Budget Office, has 'scored' other plans, but not single payer. If the single payer numbers were run by CBO, she might have the answer to her question. Wilensky was also present at one of the Senate Finance Committee hearings in May where the Committee Chairman, Senator Max Baucus, joked about needing more police as he had single payer advocates arrested for vocalizing their wish to be included in the debate. At www.singlepayeraction.org , I read that "Baucus held three days of health care hearings and heard from 41 witnesses — not one of which was a single-payer advocate," and that, "Earlier this month, Baucus said that he will use the power of his office to seek to have the criminal charges against the Baucus 13 dismissed," and that as of June 25, "Prosecutors said this week they have not heard from Baucus or his office about the matter." Doctors, nurses, other advocates are kept away from the table and face criminal charges. Wilensky and Aetna are at the table and get invited to the White House. more: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/02-5

Spare me your usual crapola JayB. Who decides that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced? Who decides that PCB, asbestos, … should be used only in a very controlled environment? Who decides that the content of cigarettes should be carefully monitored? Who decides that plywood, sheetrock, foams shouldn’t de-gass noxious chemicals in our living and working spaces? Etc … You see, the regulatory agencies, the experts already exist and make decisions all the time so there is no need to present yourself as the perpetual defender of freedom when, in fact, you act as a defender of the right of corporations to run our lives with as little regulation as possible so that they can maximize profits at our expense. What does any of the above have to do with outlawing risky behaviors where the adverse consequences are limited to the sane adults who willingly engage them on their own or with other consenting adults? Regulations that specify a set of standards that a given industry, profession, etc have to abide by are something else entirely, kemosabe. I have never discussed outlawing risky behavior, and I don't intend to. I said "regulating the pushers for risky behavior" like in regulating industries that put taxpayer subsidized sugar in all processed food. Do you have reading comprehension problems or is your eagerness to spew your propaganda about progressives and their policies getting the better of you? But if I understand well, your moto is to fantasize about the rationing of public healthcare while you remain completely silent on the current for profit healthcare that effectively rations healthcare for 1/3 of all americans (and withholds it entirely for 1/6 of all americans), AND you also like to fantasize about public healthcare excluding from coverage illnesses resulting from risky behaviors while you remain completely silent on for profit healthcare that excludes most preexisting conditions. To be perfectly candid, your rhetoric doesn't pass a basic honesty smell test.

"the green bubble" Never have conservatives been so on top of a so-called "bubble". It took them market crashes, economies tanking and systemic fraud to acknowledge the speculative bubbles of the last 30 years but this one they claim to have it figured out from the get go. What a bunch of charlatans.

The sumerians were around much before the industrial revolution when the population of the earth wasn't 6.75 billion; their methods weren't as damaging to the environment as are ours. In other words, resource and ecosystem service limits were still a long ways away, whihc is very different from today (peak oil, depletion of biotic resources, species extinctions, ..). The other part of the answer is the chemical industry and productivism have introduced over 50,000 new molecules since the 2nd world war for which we have no track record and the toxicity of which has never been studied. Whereas sumerians were mostly in quasi-equilibrium with their environment , we are clearly not. According to Paul Crutzen (of CFC/nobel prize fame) and many other scientists, we have entered the Anthropocene, when humans have become a significant global geophysical force capable of altering the planetary environment in a most significant way.

The rationing of healthcare: http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/january/make_that_22000_uni.php

Despite the slight update, this article amounts to the typical conservative tripe about how environmentalism is a short-lived palliative for the modern angst of the well-to-do, and how environmentalists are perpetual naive types that want to take us back to the stone age to live in caves while they deny the poor the means to improve their conditions. Never mind that it's the same liars pablum spewed by all consumerist dead-enders for the last 40 years, JayB thought he'd try again to deny resource and ecosystem limits. "It's all hunky-dory folks, the storm has passed, keep consuming".

Honduran Coup Turns Violent, Sanctions Imposed by Laura Carlsen Thousands of Hondurans are now in the streets to protest the coup d'etat in their country. They have been met with tear gas, anti-riot rubber bullets, tanks firing water mixed with chemicals, and clubs. Police have moved in to break down barricades and soldiers used violence to push back protesters at the presidential residence, leaving an unknown number wounded. If the coup leaders were desperate when they decided to forcibly depose the elected president, they are even more desperate now. Stripped of its pretense of legality by universal repudiation and faced with a popular uprising, the coup has turned to more violent means. The scoreboard in the battle for Honduras shows the coup losing badly. It has not gained a single point in the international diplomatic arena, it has no serious legal points, and the Honduran people are mobilizing against it. As the military and coup leaders resort to brute force, they rack up even more points against them in human rights and common decency. Only one factor brought the coup to power and only one factor has enabled it to hold on for these few days-control of the armed forces. Now even that seems to be eroding. Cracks in Army Loyalty to the Coup? Reports are coming in that several battalions-specifically the Fourth and Tenth-have rebelled against coup leadership. Both Zelaya and his supporters have been very conscious that within the armed forces there are fractures. Instead of insulting the army, outside the heavily guarded presidential residence many protesters chant, "Soldiers, you are part of the people." President Zelaya has been remarkably respectful in calling on the army to "correct its actions." It is likely the coup will continue to lose its grip on the army as intensifying mobilizations force it to confront its own people. more: International Community Imposes Sanctions - Attack on Freedom of Expression

Nobody said it was going to be free, jackass. Single payer healthcare is much cheaper than for profit healthcare (we pay twice as much as other nations for an inferior outcome) and everybody has access to healthcare, i.e. no rationing.

I find it rather ironic that you expend all this energy viz rationing of healthcare in nations that have much better healthcare than we do for ALL of their citizens when healthcare is currently rationed for 1/6th of all Americans insofar they don’t have any, and for another 1/5th because of useless health insurance coverage. Who decided that healthcare should be run for profit squandering 1/3 of every healthcare dollar on marketing, underwriting, billing, overhead, obscene CEO’s paychecks and bonuses while leaving 1/3rd of Americans without adequate health coverage?

Spare me your usual crapola JayB. Who decides that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced? Who decides that PCB, asbestos, … should be used only in a very controlled environment? Who decides that the content of cigarettes should be carefully monitored? Who decides that plywood, sheetrock, foams shouldn’t de-gass noxious chemicals in our living and working spaces? Etc … You see, the regulatory agencies, the experts already exist and make decisions all the time so there is no need to present yourself as the perpetual defender of freedom when, in fact, you act as a defender of the right of corporations to run our lives with as little regulation as possible so that they can maximize profits at our expense.