This is a problem for GOP candidate John McCain in November.... "Inflation, Consumer Prices Rise in January." (WaPo)
"Inflation accelerated in January as the rising cost of energy, food and transportation led price increases across a broad array of goods and services..... and yesterday "oil closed at a record high of more than $100 a barrel.... ."
You get the picture, our economy is in the dumper. Yet candidate McCain admitted to the Wall Street Journal editorial board in January that he "doesn't really understand economics" and looks to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm.... whom he had brought to the meeting.... as his expert on the subject! (HuffPost)
Phil Gramm! "By your advisers we shall know you" should be a heeded campaign commandment. Because we now know a lot more about McCain by his choice of an economic guru.
Gramm, who prides himself on meanness, once wrote a vanquished opponent, "I feel sorry for your many problems, but you deserve them."
Elected as a tight-fisted Texas conservative in 1984, over time he was shown to be all sermon and no scripture.... "Gramm spoke of belt-tightening, but forced it only on folks he didn't need, notably immigrants and the poor. He began his career railing against corporate subsidies, but he never pulled the trigger. Instead he became one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from energy, banking, health-care, and insurance companies." (Slate)
During his 18 years in the Senate, Gramm helped spearhead the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which allowed commercial and investment banks -- like Citigroup --to more easily merge. He's all about big business is better and anti-government.
Gramm also reflects the world-view of in-Iraq-100-years, bomb-bomb-bomb-Iran, jobs-will-never-come-back McCain. Gramm ran for president himself in 1996, and failed.... "What killed Gramm in '96 was not that he's hypocritical or too ambitious or ugly (one of his talking points) or even condescending. What killed him was that he has a deeply gloomy view of the world. Gramm lives on fear. We're on an escalator to hell..... He sees enemies everywhere."
He's been described as having "a rare quality in a successful politician. He is a man smaller than life." Making Gramm the perfect ideologial fit for McCain, but not for a country bent on change and hope for the future.
McCain's handlers and the Republican mover-doers know that McCain is weak on economics but strong on war and fear, especially fear. Watch for the fear meter to go to red by November.... a terrorist incident, escalating problems in the Middle East.... we'll know it when we see it. It'll be a commander-in-chief moment tailor-made (literally?) for MadMax McCain. Or at least spun to holocaustic-heights by the Republican myth-makers.
In November citizens will have a clear choice.... the McCain-Gramm continuance of The Decider's boogieman style and downward economic spiral, or turning the page and moving forward. No decision should be easier.
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sunday, February 03, 2008
It's the Ordinary People, Stupid
You've heard The Decider parroting the phrase over and over.... "I say that the fundamentals of our nation's economy are strong."
Just what does that mean? What are the "fundamentals." Economists say the fundamentals for a strong economy are growth in jobs, incomes and number of new households.
Obviously, either The Decider doesn't understand the fundamentals, or he's purposely whistling past the graveyard of our economy.... 17,000 jobs were wiped out last month according to the Labor department, and real wages fell last year according to a just-released study by the Economic Policy Institute.
And, new households?.... how about existing households.... people are losing their homes as home values fall and bait-and-stick-it-to-them mortgages come due.
The GOP's one-note solution to this problem is to cut taxes. What these well-heeled politicians don't realize is... IT TAKES AN INCOME TO PAY EVEN THE LOWEST TAX!
Not that the Democrats are much better.... they swarmed to The Decider's stimulus package life boat, abandoning the mother-ship of fiscal responsibility and long term solutions like.... a return to progressive taxation, higher wages and real government oversight of lending and credit practices.
As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in today's "The Boom Was a Bust For Ordinary People." (WaPo) "For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans."
In a far-off time, before NAFTA and "trickle-down" economics, job-creating titans like Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy a Ford. No more.
Today, consumer behemoth's like Wall-Mart haven't figured out that their poverty wages will eventually curtail their own growth and profits, while Ford's once-thriving auto industry shipped manufacturing overseas and a rusting Detroit builds casinos to replace them.
It's the ordinary consumers.... the poor, and the struggling middle and working class.... who "have become a tripwire in the American economy - generating defaults on debts, depressed consumption and global market turmoil."
Our war-president Bush, and the GOP's next-in-line war president John McCain, can envision only spending hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars on their bloody crusades while at home the country is imploding.
It's this type of "leadership" that is the real threat. Fundamentally flawed policies that favor the wealthy and bloated corporations while "eating our seed corn".... the working middle-class.
A strong national economy depends on ordinary people.
Just what does that mean? What are the "fundamentals." Economists say the fundamentals for a strong economy are growth in jobs, incomes and number of new households.
Obviously, either The Decider doesn't understand the fundamentals, or he's purposely whistling past the graveyard of our economy.... 17,000 jobs were wiped out last month according to the Labor department, and real wages fell last year according to a just-released study by the Economic Policy Institute.
And, new households?.... how about existing households.... people are losing their homes as home values fall and bait-and-stick-it-to-them mortgages come due.
The GOP's one-note solution to this problem is to cut taxes. What these well-heeled politicians don't realize is... IT TAKES AN INCOME TO PAY EVEN THE LOWEST TAX!
Not that the Democrats are much better.... they swarmed to The Decider's stimulus package life boat, abandoning the mother-ship of fiscal responsibility and long term solutions like.... a return to progressive taxation, higher wages and real government oversight of lending and credit practices.
As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in today's "The Boom Was a Bust For Ordinary People." (WaPo) "For years now, that strange stimulus-crazed beast, the economy, has been going its own way, increasingly disconnected from the toils and troubles of ordinary Americans."
In a far-off time, before NAFTA and "trickle-down" economics, job-creating titans like Henry Ford realized that his company would only prosper if his own workers earned enough to buy a Ford. No more.
Today, consumer behemoth's like Wall-Mart haven't figured out that their poverty wages will eventually curtail their own growth and profits, while Ford's once-thriving auto industry shipped manufacturing overseas and a rusting Detroit builds casinos to replace them.
It's the ordinary consumers.... the poor, and the struggling middle and working class.... who "have become a tripwire in the American economy - generating defaults on debts, depressed consumption and global market turmoil."
Our war-president Bush, and the GOP's next-in-line war president John McCain, can envision only spending hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars on their bloody crusades while at home the country is imploding.
It's this type of "leadership" that is the real threat. Fundamentally flawed policies that favor the wealthy and bloated corporations while "eating our seed corn".... the working middle-class.
A strong national economy depends on ordinary people.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Here "Lies" Bush's Nation
A grateful nation breathes a sigh of relief.... last night was the last time they'll have to endure The Decider's Misstatement of the Union.
The Washington Post unravels some of the untruths and half-truths in Bush's speech in "Fact Checking Key Assertions in the State of the Union." Here are a few examples.....
Bush asserted that "The Iraqis launched a surge of their own.... and today, this grass-roots surge includes more than 80,000 Iraqi citizens who are fighting the terrorists.
The "grass-roots" surge by citizens are actually Sunni neighborhood-watch groups that have been hired by the U.S. military for $300 a month. Officials aren't sure what will happen when these "citizens" are no longer paid.
The "coming together" of Sunnis, Shia and Kurds doesn't exist. In Baghdad, once heterogeneous, the Sunnis and Shia now live in separate enclaves while the Kurds have congregated in northern Iraq as an almost separate state.
The new de-Baathification law The Decider bragged on as one of the "encouraging signs" of reconciliation in many ways is more punishing to former Baath Party members than the much-criticized earlier law.
On the economy The Decider proclaimed that "Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800... This budget will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012."
Of course, since the tax cuts targeted the wealthy, they would be the ones most impacted by letting the tax cuts expire. Actually, the median American household would pay less than half of Bush's "average" $1,800 in 2011, while the richest 1 percent would pay an extra $64,154.
In truth, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected that the budget deficit will grow worse. In projecting a surplus by 2012 with his budget, Bush isn't counting the long-term cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which his administration has repeatedly underestimated. In 2009 it has budgeted $70 billion, just one-third the cost this year.
What was most discouraging about Bush's performance, was his lack of new ideas or a call to action. The closest he came was his repeated assertion that the border cannot be secured against illegal crossers unless the U.S. increases channels for foreign workers to enter legally.... but he didn't make any new specific proposal for them to do so.
Aside from the medoicre content and hectoring-Congress tone, Bush's lackluster performance didn't even attempt to energize a dispirited nation. This stood in sharp contrast to the stirring speeches earlier in the day by Patrick, Caroline and Sen. Ted Kennedy with their endorsement of an inspiring Barack Obama for president.
The Decider's I'll-show-you-daddy plans lay in disarray at his feet. Shattered by his own misconceptions, arrogance and mismanagement. All he has left are lies.
The Washington Post unravels some of the untruths and half-truths in Bush's speech in "Fact Checking Key Assertions in the State of the Union." Here are a few examples.....
Bush asserted that "The Iraqis launched a surge of their own.... and today, this grass-roots surge includes more than 80,000 Iraqi citizens who are fighting the terrorists.
The "grass-roots" surge by citizens are actually Sunni neighborhood-watch groups that have been hired by the U.S. military for $300 a month. Officials aren't sure what will happen when these "citizens" are no longer paid.
The "coming together" of Sunnis, Shia and Kurds doesn't exist. In Baghdad, once heterogeneous, the Sunnis and Shia now live in separate enclaves while the Kurds have congregated in northern Iraq as an almost separate state.
The new de-Baathification law The Decider bragged on as one of the "encouraging signs" of reconciliation in many ways is more punishing to former Baath Party members than the much-criticized earlier law.
On the economy The Decider proclaimed that "Some in Washington argue that letting tax relief expire is not a tax increase. Try explaining that to 116 million American taxpayers who would see their taxes rise by an average of $1,800... This budget will keep America on track for a surplus in 2012."
Of course, since the tax cuts targeted the wealthy, they would be the ones most impacted by letting the tax cuts expire. Actually, the median American household would pay less than half of Bush's "average" $1,800 in 2011, while the richest 1 percent would pay an extra $64,154.
In truth, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected that the budget deficit will grow worse. In projecting a surplus by 2012 with his budget, Bush isn't counting the long-term cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which his administration has repeatedly underestimated. In 2009 it has budgeted $70 billion, just one-third the cost this year.
What was most discouraging about Bush's performance, was his lack of new ideas or a call to action. The closest he came was his repeated assertion that the border cannot be secured against illegal crossers unless the U.S. increases channels for foreign workers to enter legally.... but he didn't make any new specific proposal for them to do so.
Aside from the medoicre content and hectoring-Congress tone, Bush's lackluster performance didn't even attempt to energize a dispirited nation. This stood in sharp contrast to the stirring speeches earlier in the day by Patrick, Caroline and Sen. Ted Kennedy with their endorsement of an inspiring Barack Obama for president.
The Decider's I'll-show-you-daddy plans lay in disarray at his feet. Shattered by his own misconceptions, arrogance and mismanagement. All he has left are lies.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
More Bush Braying
Watching The Decider's press conference this morning, one can't help but be struck by the.... audacity of the man.
As the headline in the Washington Post records.... "Bush Optimistic About Economy."
Huh?
The economy's great!?.... unless you wanted that job that illegal aliens are now doing, or the one that was shipped abroad.... unless you want affordable health insurance and a worry-free retirement.... unless you want to convert your mortgage or sell your home.... unless you want to take a holiday abroad.... or just to have the comfort of knowing you're life savings and way of life aren't being recklessly gambled away by an ideologically-driven incurious simpleton.
Forget the unsustainable national debt, the unprecedented level of mortgage foreclosures, the 14% unemployment rate of blacks and the U.S. dollar on life-support.... (sing) let's all join hands and skip about, while spending more billions on Iraq's shoot-out.
The president's optimism is more than just disconnected, inexplicably arrogant.... or as the former president of Mexico said of The Decider.... world-class cockiness. He's either a strutting dim-wit or out to destroy our country as we knew it before Bush and his bully boys took over.
How would you classify this maneuver by the White House as reported in Vanity Fair this month in "Billions over Baghdad".... about some billions in cash that went missing in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, the Iraq Coalition Provisional authority received $12 billion in cash from the New York Federal Reserve - that is 363 tons of money.
Well... $9 billion of this cash simply vanished. That's 272 tons of cash!! The job of auditing and disbursing this money was outsourced. To a firm, NorthStar, so small that it's mailing address is a post-office box in Nassau, and it's "office" a split-level home in La Jolla, California.
As former Fed Chairman Greenspan noted in his new book, this is a "dysfunctional" government. He was kind. Isn't it more like a criminally dysfunctional government?
One thing The Decider trumpeted at his news conference that we can readily agree with.... corporate profits "seem to be strong." Oh yes... just ask NorthStar and the "Baghdad billionaires."
As the headline in the Washington Post records.... "Bush Optimistic About Economy."
Huh?
The economy's great!?.... unless you wanted that job that illegal aliens are now doing, or the one that was shipped abroad.... unless you want affordable health insurance and a worry-free retirement.... unless you want to convert your mortgage or sell your home.... unless you want to take a holiday abroad.... or just to have the comfort of knowing you're life savings and way of life aren't being recklessly gambled away by an ideologically-driven incurious simpleton.
Forget the unsustainable national debt, the unprecedented level of mortgage foreclosures, the 14% unemployment rate of blacks and the U.S. dollar on life-support.... (sing) let's all join hands and skip about, while spending more billions on Iraq's shoot-out.
The president's optimism is more than just disconnected, inexplicably arrogant.... or as the former president of Mexico said of The Decider.... world-class cockiness. He's either a strutting dim-wit or out to destroy our country as we knew it before Bush and his bully boys took over.
How would you classify this maneuver by the White House as reported in Vanity Fair this month in "Billions over Baghdad".... about some billions in cash that went missing in Iraq. After the 2003 invasion, the Iraq Coalition Provisional authority received $12 billion in cash from the New York Federal Reserve - that is 363 tons of money.
Well... $9 billion of this cash simply vanished. That's 272 tons of cash!! The job of auditing and disbursing this money was outsourced. To a firm, NorthStar, so small that it's mailing address is a post-office box in Nassau, and it's "office" a split-level home in La Jolla, California.
As former Fed Chairman Greenspan noted in his new book, this is a "dysfunctional" government. He was kind. Isn't it more like a criminally dysfunctional government?
One thing The Decider trumpeted at his news conference that we can readily agree with.... corporate profits "seem to be strong." Oh yes... just ask NorthStar and the "Baghdad billionaires."
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