Real people are the economy.
Sometimes bad things happen to real people… Good hard working folks who can’t find meaningful work because of the mauling of the US economy through the divisive tea partiers and their ilk in the handling of the debt ceiling manufactured crisis and the resulting downgrade. The burning of all equities is now another bonfire of the vanities. And the thing is nobody ‘s showing any love for the resulting equity bargains. Let the bears enter stage right…
Conservative policies aren’t working. And the same happens across the pond in the UK where the London fires are burning like another Blitz — same like the markets consuming your savings and earned wealth and in some cases your real estate, even in posh and leafy Ealing Broadway.
And all of this came seemingly as a result of some of the best intentions of thoughtless ideologues in charge of the easiest road to hell. Mind you these are not real people but cutouts of a divisive ideological doctrine – same as the Soviets of yore — masquerading as conservative patriots but acting out their tea party freak. They let out their inner freak, celebrating Pyrhian victories as the US downgrade socializes the losses and privatizes gains and government wealth and the Commons in a free for all debauchery of privateers and corsairs once more looting your savings and earnings and those of all normal hard working tax paying society.
Your savings are at stake along with the future of the American economy. No less. And you wanted to trust the tea party with it? You were listening and voting the losers lot in office — so now enjoy the fruits of your labours. Well Done — Time now to eat shit.
Because as the wisdom of old attests, demagogues always drive their people to the wall.
Proof of this came sooner than expected.
The Wall Street markets lost more than a Trillion dollars in a single day this Monday. We’ll remember this August 8th as the real beginning of the Double dip W recession after the US sovereign debt downgrade That’s comparable to the first Black Monday of October 28th 1929, the day of the infamous CRASH. It’s more investors money lost today, than on any day since the black Friday too. Certainly more money lost in the US than last Thursday when the markets in the US and around the world tanked too. US investors losses are reflected in the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index, a Broad index of U.S. stocks that lost respectively a trillion dollars in the stock market Monday as the honest American people come around to the realization and start placing the blame where it rightfully rests. At the feet of squabbling politicians in Washington for their ideological stupidity and ill fate in causing this crisis. Bringing it on to themselves like little evil chicken coming home to roost. You know this is what’s all about.
How is this tea party thing working for you tight now?
It’s a really scary roller coaster and so are the markets for the sovereign debt and the equities across the world. And in all the world this is the result of a phenomenal lack of leadership. This is the real issue and the continued sell off of all world markets is a real self goal by the ersatz leaders appearing to be in charge but in reality only reacting to their own private fears and social mores. Or shall I say the minions in charge are mere spectators in the game that the Markets are pricing now a double dip recession and a bear market is unfolding to the tune of a pied piper leading the kids down the garden path.
America’s and the world’s equities sell off was today as punishing as it was last Thursday’s stock market demise and it will continue until some of the excess fat is burned off… along with a lot of healthy economic muscle.
Yes, we need to act now. Another round of quantitative easing is needed as an emergency measure. Where is the beard when you need him?
And we say the hell with the dick strokers and ”Mr Bonner” their leader in Congress. Time to wake up.
We need to summon the spirit of Entrepreneurship in America to sort this self made mess out.
With Friday’s payroll report for July showing that nearly fourteen million Americans are out of work, and more than six million of them have been jobless for more than six months we are amazed at the cavalier attitude of the dick strokers in the House.
And although those figures were slightly better than expected, that just reflects how low expectations have sunk. Today the Dow has tumbled again more than five hundred points coming at the heels of last Thursday’s five hundred point drop and just a weekend after Standard & Poor took the unprecedented step of downgrading the U.S. bond rating. And we are ready for a fight.
The President just spoke and said that we can fix this. And the figures can confirm this for all of us. But to be able to fix it we need leadership… crossing these dire straits.
And in the event that further confirmation is needed, that the country is facing an immediate economic crisis of a double dip recession as we had forecast, here it goes. Because serious stern action needs to be taken, here are the real news for real people. Even after the rating downgrade, it isn’t primarily a crisis of a debt ceilings shattered, government spending gone wild, or any of the other issues that have dominated the discussion in the nation’s capital. It is, as President Obama acknowledged again today, a crisis of leadership, a crisis of growth, a crisis of jobs and lack of prosperity.
For more than two years, the unemployment rate has been close to or above nine per cent. That is the official rate and it would be higher, if the government counted people who have given up looking for work or who have been forced to work part time. If we counted those too, the rate would be sixteen per cent at least. And it’s not just the labour market that is frantically signalling distress. The gross domestic product, after growing modestly in 2009 and 2010, has hardly expanded at all this year. Consumer spending has stalled. In many places, house prices are still falling. On Wall Street, there is renewed talk of a double-dip recession and the markets are tanking.
A political system that responded rationally to the country’s problems would be concentrating on creating jobs. Surprisingly, Washington’s conservative controlled legislature is moving in the opposite direction as if they do not understand history and basic economics. They move the opposite way of sanity and reason by going toward austerity and job cuts.
In the past few months, the 2009 stimulus program has started to wind down, and the Federal Reserve has withdrawn its emergency-support operation, which pumped money into the financial system. Now comes the debt-ceiling agreement. The deal, which calls for more than two trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next decade, does less than nothing to promote economic growth or create jobs in the coming months, and next to nothing to solve the long-term fiscal challenges facing the country, hence S. & P.’s downgrade. In a statement, the ratings agency said, “The fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.” If the country is to be solvent ten or twenty years from now, there will need to be reasonable limits on entitlement spending and a substantial increase in federal tax revenues, which are currently languishing at fifteen per cent of G.D.P., the lowest level in sixty years. Yet neither entitlement reform nor revenue increases are dealt with in the agreement.
Still, the downgrade should not be allowed to distract attention from the unemployment crisis. What is needed, and what the system appears unable to deliver, is short-term action on jobs and credible long-term deficit reduction. About the best that can be said of the debt-ceiling agreement is that it doesn’t entail major spending cuts for this year or next. Of the nine hundred billion dollars in cuts already agreed upon, just twenty-five billion—less than one per cent of the federal budget—are slated for fiscal 2012. The cuts get steeper in later years. Where those cuts fall, and whether they are accompanied by significant revenue increases, will be determined by a “super committee” of congressional Democrats and Republicans, which is to report back in November with recommendations on how to find another trillion and a half dollars in deficit reduction. If the members cannot reach an agreement, or if Congress rejects its recommendations, a series of automatic cuts will go into effect in 2013.
In pushing the government to the brink of default, the House Republicans adopted outrageous tactics. Those tactics worked politically, but at great cost to the country. The debt downgrade was a direct result of the political paralysis in Washington. In retrospect, the White House erred last December in not demanding a raise in the debt ceiling as the price of extending the Bush tax cuts. Failing that, Obama should have refused to bargain with the House Republicans and threatened, if necessary, to raise the debt ceiling by administrative order, citing the Fourteenth Amendment.
But this was more than a failure of tactics: it was a failure of strategy. After last year’s midterm elections, when the Tea Party swept into Washington, the Administration moved toward fiscal conservatism, proposing four trillion dollars in deficit reduction over twelve years. This proposal depended on two assumptions: that Republicans would negotiate in good faith, considering tax increases as well as spending cuts; and that the economy was strong enough to sustain an expansion in the face of a shift to austerity policies.
Now that those assumptions have proved to be alarmingly false, the President, while not ignoring the imperative of long-term debt reduction, must return to the economics of growth. He has already put forward some proposals—extending the payroll-tax cut, passing new trade agreements, clearing away some of the red tape that businesses encounter—which would help, but not nearly enough. A substantive jobs bill is what’s called for, and the White House should send one to Congress as soon as possible after it returns from the summer recess.
On Wall Street — in today’s Black Monday — and unlike in Washington, there is general agreement that the 2009 stimulus package was one of the main reasons that the economy expanded, however slowly, in the past couple of years and more of the same is needed. So any political suggestions that a new jobs package would spook the markets are without foundation.
Even now, after the bond downgrade, and the falling markets, the economy, the society, the government and even the flim-flam credit-ratings agencies would embrace a carefully costed job creation package, simply because it makes economic sense. This is because the quickest way to reduce the budget deficit is to create jobs and get the backbone of the taxpayer class back to work.
And if you want to see thee truth – think and feel of this: The real barrier to a meaningful jobs program is not the markets or the ratings agencies or even the depressive consumer sentiment, but the GOP and the unconservative and unsound tea party policies of the Republican party.
The Republicans said they were going to vote down a jobs bill if it increased spending. And they fail to recognize that their actions would hurt not only the economy but also their own job prospects.
Never again since the time of the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire with Nero’s entering his horse in the Senate as full senator, have legislators been so daft and self defeating towards their Republic. They brought the downfall themselves– full on — same as now.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama, the Democratic President, is active with real people’s interests at heart, campaigning and fighting to create jobs. And this is a winning strategy.
President Barack Obama called on Congress to act in the wake of S&P downgrade…
”Markets will rise and fall, but this is the United States of America…
President Barack Obama called on Congress to act in the wake of the Standard & Poor’s historic downgrade of the U.S. debt but defied the credit rating agency’s conclusions. ”Our problem is not a lack of confidence in our credit. Our challenge is the need to address our deficits over the longer term,” Obama said. “But there’s not much further we can cut in the long term.”
Banking analysts and investor Warren Buffett continued to downplay the downgrade and affirmed their bets on the bulletproof U.S. debt. However, markets continued the sell-off. Dow Jones Industrial Average losses passed more than 500 points again today as the President gave his speech: ”That threat has now roiled the market and slowed the pace of recovery,” Obama said.
The president then returned to a rhetoric displayed during the debt ceiling negotiations, calling on the new special committee to combine cuts in domestic and military spending with new tax revenue from the wealthy and reform of the overall tax code.
S&P downgraded the triple-A status of the U.S. debt Friday for the first time since assigning it in 1941. Moody’s Investors Service first assigned the gilt-edged rating in 1917. Moody’s and Fitch Ratings both reaffirmed their triple-A ratings Monday.
The debt ceiling negotiations ended in a compromised plan that would raise the cap on borrowing and cut an initial $917 billion in spending. But the contentious compromise left tougher political decisions on future cuts and possible new revenues to a super committee report due around Christmas. A minimum of $2.1 trillion in cuts is expected, but even if that is made, S&P said the new double-A-plus rating would only be confirmed.
Obama pointed out initial proposals from both Republicans, Democrats and his early talks with house leader Rep. John Boehner had yielded plans to avoid a debt downgrade.
Still, Obama said he would issue recommendations to the super committee over the coming weeks and called on Congress to extend payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance immediately.
“Markets will rise and fall, but this is the United States of America. No matter what some rating agency will say, we will always be and always have been a triple-A country,” Obama said.
I would agree with the President, because I couldn’t trust enough the debt of anyone else, nor even say the same for any other country.
And for the Eastern and Sino admirers, I have this to say: The world’s second and third economy are in a difficult state too. Because China is in the throes of a bubble the likes of which You haven’t ever seen… and Japan is in the doldrums with Fukushima still burning in melt down and half a million people unemployed.
So who is left?
The old US of A
Yours,
Pano
PS:
And for real action by real people we need a recipe for success. So this is how we can make this right and these are the necessary policies which will make a real dent in unemployment and support the basis of our economy the labour market. Because as old Abe used to say, Labour is the basis of America’s strength.
1) Provide tax subsidies and economic incentives to businesses that hire new workers.
2) Extend extra tax cuts to all firms that build new factories and create new offices and service centres.
3) Investing in infrastructure projects.
4) Import a version of the job-sharing scheme that Germany has created.
5) Launch a national community-service program.
6) Start a national Works Program much like FDR’s great society Depression era Works Program.
7) Push a Marshall Plan for the labour market within the United States’ worse hit areas and regions of double digit unemployment.
Abraham Lincoln said: ”Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor…”
”Let all thoughtful citizens sustain them, for the future of Labor is the future of America.”
“If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool.”
And old Abe went on to speak directly to today’s Republicans, and the tea partiers – the dregs of the proud party whose modern form, he had founded: ”All that harms labor is treason to America.”
How is that for patriotism and speaking to you — my Republican friends — pray tell, how does it work for you?
Even though the Washington GOP elites might disagree, the reality is that the federal government has to increase borrowing and also increase spending. It;s as simple as 2+2=4
Go ahead and pump more money in the economy.
Start things up with a QE3, because this is what real governments are supposed to do in an economic downturn. More quantitative easing is needed… Get Bernanke’s beard quivering and back to work immediately.
And this is the way we will succeed in reducing unemployment for real people in order to get us out of this messy double dip W recession we are in on this conservative’s road to perdition.
And for my tea party friends in the US and also for the three stooges Boris, Nick and David, back home in London, I have this to say: Repent. Repent, Repent.
Repent and change because this is the only way we can save ourselves after yesterday’s Kristallnacht riots in London. Change holds promise and hope same like it does for all sinners condemned to eternal perdition. Repent and change course quickly in order to be saved. And saved you will, because simple stupidity is not enough to doom us all to perdition forever.
Creating jobs is job number one.
