Recent comments

  • Is there seems to be a great deal of confusion on revenue vs income, and corporate income taxes vs personal income taxes.

    Reply to: Obama vs. McCain vs. America on the Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • discussed by Spencer on Angry Bear.

    Reply to: Frightened consumers have stopped spending   16 years 2 weeks ago
  • Other American Dreams.

    What kills me about Sirota is all during the primary, while Hillary after dumping Mark Penn was pumping out policy after policy that was really superior on manufacturing, trade, unions, labor...Sirota was busy blasting her, often with some seriously incorrect statements.

    Now, here we are in the general and he realizes that it's DLC 3.0 with Rubins once again running the economic show vs. McCain who just recently stole a couple of policies out of Clinton's stack and of course other positions are classic corporate/labor arbitrage ones...

    Why did he not write this in the primary, when one had a chance to move the Democratic platform and candidates to a more Progressive/Populist agenda?

    It's a good read, especially on how the propaganda, rhetoric tries to poo poo blue collar.

    We need Jill the Engineer to be on T.V. instead of Joe the Plumber. Odds are Joe the Plumber is making more money than Jill the Engineer so presenting Professionals as the way to economic prosperity is a huge lie that is not confronted in this above article.

    Although I agree, for 30 years now media and politicians really has looked down their nose at manufacturing, blue collar workers, badly.

    Reply to: Obama vs. McCain vs. America on the Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • Honestly that makes no sense for it was regional and there isn't that much manufacturing in the area, unless they count oil as manufacturing these days and because in 2006 there were more hurricanes.

    They also require a 700 credit score to buy a car so it might more be the infamous "increase your debt Americans so you can buy" system is imploding.

    Reply to: Frightened consumers have stopped spending   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • not at all.

    If anything I think we will be seeing an accelleration of offshoring and imports as the US economic continues to sink

    A complete vicious circle

    Reply to: China: still booming or crashing?   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • I am posting China-related stories solely for their impact on what is likely the first global recession in over 30 years.

    Until recently, Wall Street was talking about Asia, and specifically China, "de-coupling" from the US. That's not what I see at all.

    Reply to: China: still booming or crashing?   16 years 2 weeks ago
  • How can anyone believe any staitistics from china - a closed authoritarian govt? I would believe them even less than our own manipulated statistics

    I think these attempts however to write a premature obituatuary for the china economy as largely exaggerated, and yet another feel good cover for the pro globalist forces

    Reply to: China: still booming or crashing?   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • What I find humorous is people who badmouth US government statistics, but take Chinese government statistics at face value.

    In case it wasn't clear from my post, I suspect that China's economy, after the Olympics, has probably slowed to a crawl.

    Reply to: China: still booming or crashing?   16 years 2 weeks ago
  • I find this concern that china is slowing to a measly 9.7% growth humorous

    As long as their labor is cheap, regulations lax and currency manipulated I see no crash or reduction in the amount of imported chinese crap and US jobs outsourced.

    if anything I think we will start to see some further acceleration in offshoring and increased trade deficits with china

     

     

    Reply to: China: still booming or crashing?   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • The morons were too busy making obscene amounts of money to worry about a small thing like the systemic failure of the financial system.

    Reply to: The Evil Doers of the Financial Crisis   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • $637 billion

    Does this make sense to anyone why in hell trillions must go to the global financial system?

    Seriously there are so many other methods which do not involve public funds...

    these sums are massive.

    Reply to: Wall Street Bailout: Trickle-Down Economics on Steroids   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • AIG

    This is a story in and of itself. We need a good long post documenting the sheer incompetence and just sucking up the money of so many executives.

    Reply to: Wall Street Bailout: Trickle-Down Economics on Steroids   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • Short story even shorter: AIG failed due to stupidity of execs. The programmers were fired. AIG was bailed out by US taxpayers. AIG then sent executives to a resort spending $440,000 in the process, including $23,380 in spa treatments.

    Here is the very short article: John Miano Article

    *sigh*

    Reply to: Wall Street Bailout: Trickle-Down Economics on Steroids   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • I didn't even bother to cover it for it appears they are completely ignoring the topic....Chris Dodd should probably get a little expose here as well as Barney Frank.

    Reply to: The Evil Doers of the Financial Crisis   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • I read When Genius Failed about a year ago. The derivatives market was the leading cause of the failure of LTCM in 1998.
    So what did they do? They completely deregulated the market.

    Reply to: The Evil Doers of the Financial Crisis   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • This top down insanity which is a glorified invented religion so the super rich can justify their wealth redistribution system upward clearly does not work, especially when a nation is not running at capacity.

    Anyone remember micro loans which gave small sums to the super poor and the system worked, helped enabled poor to start small businesses?

    Reply to: Wall Street Bailout: Trickle-Down Economics on Steroids   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • this weekend. I've just spent two days on the road, and I've got a ton of paperwork waiting to be attended to.

    The gang over at European Tribune picked up on this same article.

    Reply to: Obama vs. McCain vs. America on the Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago
  • I think it's important for people to realize that the culprits are on both sides, in both campaigns, both parties.

    Want to write it up? Cut and paste of my comment is aok and cut and paste are your friend.

    Reply to: Obama vs. McCain vs. America on the Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • See, I see the anti-regulators as a symptom of a much, much larger problem. The problem can be called the problem of cooperation with evil in an attempt to do good. It never works out well in the long term.

    Regulation could have indeed softened the blow. But time after time, the natural result of allowing big businesses and the economy to grow is consolidation of wealth. With consolidation of wealth, you get people who are able to afford lobbyists to change the regulatory environment to their satisfaction. Eventually some new idea all blows up in our faces, and we call for more regulation. But more regulation is only a partial solution- because the real problem is consolidation of wealth to begin with.

    Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, was the lesson supposedly given by WWII. But Power isn't the only thing that corrupts- Wealth corrupts as well. Once you give in to the idea that profit is it's own king, that it's a single-issue peak, all sorts of other nasty things get justified and justifiable.

    I've said before that all of the bailouts in the world won't bring me back to trusting the bankers. We don't need more regulation, more cooperating with evil. We need destruction of the evil; permanent removal of the people and business plans that cause the problem from positions of power and wealth.

    Only then can alternative methods based on other ideals have a chance to be tried.

    Reply to: The Bipolar Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago
    EPer:
  • I would get a tremendous kick if you wrote this up. Cover what Rubin and the gang have been up to and what derivatives are.

    And dropped it over at Red State or one of the right wing blogs.

    You ought to check out this piece about the role played by computer executed trading of derivatives in the crisis. And this shocked me.

    Amid all the fallout from the financial turmoil, one group has yet to feel the accusing finger of blame: the analysts who built the computer software that drove the derivatives markets that, in turn, drove the financial collapse. Since the Big Bang of the 1980s, large amounts of stocks and shares - and derivatives of them - have been traded automatically by computers rather than by humans. These so-called "algotrades" accounted for as much as 40% of all trades on the London Stock Exchange in 2006; on some American equity markets the figure can be as high as 80%.

    80% of trade volume is being executed without human oversight?

    This is yet another example of the conflation of wealth with productive power a la List.

    The origin is wealth is not these false financial instruments, but productive power, i.e. the power to take an item and add value to it through labor.

    Reply to: Obama vs. McCain vs. America on the Economy   16 years 2 weeks ago

Pages