http://www.investorsinsight.com/...
$800B for and Wall St. - no problem
from Obama admin
$700B for MIC - no problem from Obama admin
social net program - you now get IOU's
http://news.yahoo.com/...
"This is not just a wake-up call, this is it. We're here," said Mary Johnson, a policy analyst with The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group. "We are not going to be able to put it off any more."
For more than two decades, regardless of which political party was in power, Congress has been accused of raiding the Social Security trust funds to pay for other programs, masking the size of the budget deficit.
The current economic reality of America today
• More than five million homeowners are behind on their mortgages.
• There are over six million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months, a record 40% of the ranks of the jobless.
• The private capital stock is growing at its slowest rate in nearly two decades.
• Roughly 30% of manufacturing capacity is sitting idle.
• Nearly 19 million residential housing units, or about 15% of the stock, is vacant.
• One in six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed.
• Commercial real estate values are down 30% over the past year.
• The average American worker has seen his/her level of wealth plunge $100,000 over the last two years, even with the recovery in equity markets this past year.
• Bank credit is contracting at an unprecedented 15% annual rate so far this year as lenders sit on a record $1.3 trillion of cash.
• Unit labor costs are down an unprecedented 4.7% over the past year, and what has replenished household coffers has been the federal government, as transfer payments from Uncle Sam which now make up a record 18% of personal income (and the Senate just passed yet another jobless benefit extension bill!)."
Wow. 18% of personal income in the US is now from the US government (also known as taxpayers, current and future).
What a joke !
Gee wonder if Obama has read this book ?
Democracy Incorporated:
Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
http://press.princeton.edu/...
Democracy is struggling in America--by now this statement is almost cliché. But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?
Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level.
Democracy Incorporated is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come.
Update 1
NYTimes: Report Is Critical of Obama’s Efforts at Transparency
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Hoocoodanode