Now that CNBC has officially announced the obvious, that we are indeed in the gripes of a Great Depression, and other well known economists are stating the other hidden truths, such as the fact that the United States of America is completely bankrupt*, I was reading Paul Krugman's op-ed piece entitled: America Goes Dark.
Some people continue to go back to this argument that the original 'stimulus package' was not enough. I find this particular argument, just another of what I call a 'decoy' (one of many) that does not face up to the single most important truth that most Americans refuse to face, and that is the 'greatest transfer of wealth, the Great Heist of 2008,' is what was swept under the rug and is still being hidden by our entire government. This 'corruption' was specifically why there was no money available for any kind of real stimulus package, that could have and should have put the corner stone of this nation, the Middle Class back on it's feet. Now because of this 'cover up,' America is Going Dark.
The mid-summer rally is over and stocks will begin a downward leg before bottoming in October, as the world economy is in what looks like a Great Depression, Robin Griffiths, a technical strategist at Cazenove Capital, told CNBC Monday.
"Equities are for losers and bond markets for winners. Equities are simply for people who like losing money," Griffiths said.
"A double-dip is inevitable and imminent, as Keynesian stimulus measures have never worked anywhere. We are in the equivalent of a Great Depression following 3 years of credit crisis," he added.
http://www.cnbc.com/...
Did you hear that America? Equity is for losers. And at least Mr. Griffiths has the courage to state how this happened....quote: 'following 3 years of credit crisis.' And how did that 'credit crisis' happen? It happened because Wall Street/the Banks, the Regulators, the SEC, the NYSE, and all three branches of our government were complicit in the biggest cover up and corruption of the greatest transfer of wealth in our nation's history.
Let's at least be clear on how we got here and why. So that you fully understand what has been stolen, consider this: Not only have millions and millions of jobs been lost, but few of them are coming back...not only have millions and millions of people lost their homes in foreclosures because they lost their jobs, but those that had worked hard all their lives for the 'equity' in their homes, have lost that equity, and remember: 'Equity is for losers.' Not only have people's life savings and pensions been stolen and eaten up by this bank of Oligarchs, crooks, liars and thieves, but consider this simple fact: Not one of them has gone to jail, while America Goes Dark.
How did we get to this point? It’s the logical consequence of three decades of antigovernment rhetoric, rhetoric that has convinced many voters that a dollar collected in taxes is always a dollar wasted, that the public sector can’t do anything right.
The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.
So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
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You know, the only sentence I agree with Mr. Krugman about is that last sentence: America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.
Mr. Krugman, like most main stream media personalities, always seem to 'dance around the 500 pound elephant in the room, known as 'Corruption.' He states that our nation seems to have a 'war' going on in terms of 'antigoverment,' when in fact, the truth of the matter is not that the American people have a war going on against their government, they have a war going on towards a 'Corrupt government.' But of course, Mr. Krugman, never bothers to 'pin the tail' on that Donkey. The 'Elephant or the Donkey' doesn't seem to matter anymore to most American's in the political body, because most American's are more than smart enough to know why America is going dark, why they have lost their jobs, their homes, their life savings and pensions, as Matt Tabbi put it so well - Americans 'got the cover story' from our government, and they sure as hell are not buying it.
All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.
http://www.rollingstone.com/...
You'll excuse me, Mr. Krugman, if I pass up another one of your 'bullshit' op-ed pieces, that to me is just as 'insulting' as the Dodd-Frank 'cover story.'
The reason that our nation is now in the gripes of 'extremism' is specifically because both parties are going with the 'cover story' and Americans aren't buying it either. Most Americans are smart enough to know exactly why America is going Dark, how they lost their jobs, homes and their savings/pensions. But more than that, Americans have access to the internet are are more than aware that America is now 'bankrupt.'
Earlier, we posted a link to Boston University's Lawrence Kotlikoff who penned an OpEd for Bloomberg titled simply enough "U.S. Is Bankrupt and We Don't Even Know." In it Kotlikoff took a direct stab at Krugman and all the other hard core Keynesian paradise or bust demagogues: "Some doctrinaire Keynesian economists would say any stimulus over the next few years won’t affect our ability to deal with deficits in the long run. This is wrong as a simple matter of arithmetic. The fiscal gap is the government’s credit-card bill and each year’s 14 percent of GDP is the interest on that bill. If it doesn’t pay this year’s interest, it will be added to the balance. Demand-siders say forgoing this year’s 14 percent fiscal tightening, and spending even more, will pay for itself, in present value, by expanding the economy and tax revenue. My reaction? Get real, or go hang out with equally deluded supply-siders. Our country is broke and can no longer afford no- pain, all-gain 'solutions'." To hammer his critical point in that delaying the inevitable crunch will only make things worse in the end, Kotlikoff also appeared on Bloomberg TV with Erik Schatzker. Koltikoff's argument is anchored by the IMF's July report that notes the US needs to grow at 14% in perpetuity to "grow into" its balance sheet. Obviously, we will be lucky to get a tenth of that.
Some of Kotlikoff's other observations on why the yields on the near and mid-part of the UST curve are now into record territory is that "we have systematic failure of disclosure of what is really happening on the fiscal side. Government and international organizations are lying effectively lying to us, there is no question about it. The present value of the difference between spending and revenues from the CBO is $200 trillion." The BU economist suggests to introduce a comprehensive healthcare reform with vouchers subject to budget constraints, a progressive low-rate consumption tax, and social security reform. He ends: "There are things we could do but we are in deep doo doo." Not the most eloquent interview, but he is certainly correct in broad strokes.
http://www.zerohedge.com/...
Thank you Mr. Kotlikoff, and I agree with everything except your idea of social security reform. Screw that, because once again, we are facing more of the same: Rob Peter (the Middle Class) to once again pay Paul (the Oligarchy and the Military Industrial Complex, aka known as the crooks, liars and thieves).
I've been laughing at how completely foolish Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke are looking these days. It is like watching two men walking 'naked' down the crumbling streets of our nation, pretending they are wearing the $5,000 Armani suits (that they usually wear). Guess what Timmy and Bennie? NO ONE FUCKING BELIEVES YOU ANYMORE.
Here you go Timmy and Bennie - here is what Mr. Kotlikoff and the entire world knows:
"we have systematic failure of disclosure of what is really happening on the fiscal side. Government and international organizations are lying effectively lying to us, there is no question about it. The present value of the difference between spending and revenues from the CBO is $200 trillion."
What bothers me most about what is going on in our national political body, is the 'insult' that keeps adding to the 'injury' day after day. So if you want to write a diary about how Robert Gibbs is 'dissing the progressives' in our party (again), or why it was perfectly viable for President Obama to go on The View, and talk about Lindsay Lohan, and Snooky, or actually 'believing' in Timothy Geithner's latest bullshit 'recovery is just around the corner' story, well then by all means, play into the 'Decoy' idiocy of it all, but I'll be staying here in the 'reality based,' world of what is really coming our way next, and that is more wars, endless wars, and the final answer that is in fact 'the truth and nothing but the truth,' .....that when all else fails (and it has) they take you to war:
It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that "foiling operations" conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran "unacceptable," will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.
But none of these things—least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran—seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran—possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft. (It’s so crowded, in fact, that the United States Central Command, whose area of responsibility is the greater Middle East, has already asked the Pentagon what to do should Israeli aircraft invade its airspace. According to multiple sources, the answer came back: do not shoot them down.)
In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
As America goes dark, and our country is crumbling right before our eyes, let's at least not pretend any longer why 'there is no second stimulus package, and why the first one was not 'big enough'. The real reason our national economy was destroyed, is because Wall Street/the Banks, the Regulators, the Federal Reserve, and all three branches of our government, both Republicans and Democrats, were complicit in the worst corruption and 'cover up' our nation has ever experienced, and that is why they are now talking about reforming 'Social Security and Medicare' down at the Cat Food Commission, and why there will never be enough money to put the corner stone of this nation, the Middle Class, back on it's feet again.
It is the exact same reason, we 'will' be going to war in the near future, because history is of course, repeating itself, again and again.
The Democratic Party needs a 'peace candidate' again. Someone with the courage of Robert F. Kennedy to stand up and be counted, before it is too late. I thought that person was Barack Obama. I was wrong.
Perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, victims: we can be clear about three of these categories. The bystander, however, is the fulcrum. If there are enough notable exceptions, then protest reaches a critical mass. We don’t usually think of history as being shaped by silence, but, as English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’