I said this to Michael Moore in my last diary about his let's mock Rahm diary and this is exactly what I will say to you Cenk for your divisive diary.
If you think you can come in here and throw your vitriol to undermine the Administration using Rahm as a punching bag two months before the mid-term election, don't expect to be praised with open arms.
Please stop being a professional pout rage artists. It don't add much value in electing more Democrats this November.
And, here is about that gigantic deficit in voter enthusiasm that you claim to spin. Get a clue.
And, who do you thing should take credit for this beside the POTUS ? Again, get a clue.
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Ok, now about our slow economic growth and contributing factors voters should know about:
- Corporations seating on record cash
- Cost of Iraqi War
- The Euro Crisis
- The Koch Brothers
- The Pending Home Sales Narrative
More below the fold...
1) Whether we like it or not, Corporations are greedy bastards and are not helping. Companies hold record $837B in cash, yet won't hire workers By Matt Krantz, USA TODAY
What do corporations have against looking out for the best interest of the country while they see how Americans are suffering? Why wouldn't Cash-Rich Companies not hire or invest when they are seating on an unprecedented level of cash?
It would have been reasonable to rationalize Corporations' actions if this Administration was not working hard to turn the tides. But, since being in office, this Administration has been working relentlessly to change the trajectory of the economy, slowing the bleeding, which should be an encouraging sign to Corporations to act similarly. So why won't big businesses step-up to the plate to do their part to grow the economy? Well, I only have one answer...as Michael Douglas puts it, it is called GREED!!
From the article linked above:
Anyone wondering where all the economy's jobs are might want to look into piggy banks of the world's biggest companies.
Cash is gushing into companies' coffers as they report what's shaping up to be the third-consecutive quarter of sharp earnings increases. But instead of spending on the typical things, such as expanding and hiring people, companies are mostly pocketing the money and stuffing it under their corporate mattresses.
Non-financial companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 have a record $837 billion in cash, S&P says. That's enough to pay 2.4 million people $70,000-a-year salaries for five years. For context, 2.2 million to 2.8 million jobs were saved or created by the $862 billion stimulus that President Obama signed into law in February 2009, according to a report released in April from the Council of Economic Advisers.
Rather than investing in their future, companies are piling up cash and collecting practically zero interest on the money, hoping there will be a better time to invest later.
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...and who are the best of friends with these Corporations?
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2) The true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond
Do you ever wonder had we not gone into Bush's personal Iraq war, where we could have been? Really, would we even have a President Obama today? Would we have piled on more debt or reduced it or would we be in Iran instead? The unknown can be scary. I certainly wouldn't want to take any risk with the Republicans if what I have seen in the last 22 months are any indication forget about the 8 years of Bush. I take the fear of having Republican'ts becoming the majority party to the voting booth this November.
For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe? The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.
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Afghanistan
The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked.
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Oil
When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008.
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Federal debt
There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.
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The financial crisis
The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home.
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The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.
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...so, I think it is appropriate to say, "Fuck you George W. Bush" for fucking with our livelihood you SOB. Dick Cheney too!
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3) How much do we know about the Global effect on our economy?The Euro Crisis: A Threat to the U.S. Economy by Uri Dadush
Effects on the United States
The trade and investment links between the United States and the European Union (EU) are significant. Europe consumes twenty percent of U.S. exports and holds more than 50 percent of U.S. overseas assets, while the United States holds close to 40 percent of Europe’s foreign assets. Lower growth and higher volatility in Europe could therefore have serious consequences for the United States, hindering export growth and endangering assets. Europe has already shown itself to be the laggard in the global recovery—in the first quarter, European GDP was up only 0.3 percent (y/y), compared to 2.5 percent in the United States and 11.9 percent in China—and the situation may well get worse before it gets better.
The crisis will likely lead the euro to depreciate further in the coming months. The euro has already fallen more than 20 percent against the dollar since late November—two months before Obama unveiled his goal of doubling exports in the next five years—and it may fall to parity. In sectors where U.S. and European exports overlap (e.g., aircraft, machinery, professional services), a lower euro will hinder the competitiveness of U.S. goods on the global market. The depreciation will also reduce the purchasing power of European tourists traveling to the United States and make European goods relatively cheaper in U.S. markets at a time when policy makers are hoping to avoid a return to high current account deficits. With imports likely to rise and exports likely to fall, the U.S. bilateral trade balance with Europe will likely deteriorate. By definition, the profitability of U.S. companies operating in Europe will be affected by the Euro crisis when profits and assets on the balance sheets are expressed in dollars. U.S. companies selling in Europe and sourcing in dollars will see even sharper profit declines, though U.S. companies selling into the dollar area and sourcing in Europe will benefit.
In simple English, the strength of the US economy in its recovery efforts will relatively depends on a stable Euro and European Economy. As a US company, if you do business in Europe producing a product and if their is a loss of demand as is the case in the European economies, your product will suffer and the US company is pretty much screwed with inventory levels stocked and not being able to sell. This will force lowering of price to attract demand which translates to lost profit.
Coupled with a weak/devalued Euro, the US company doing business in Europe is going to loss its profit margin in US currency when you try to bring the money home which translates to your income statement showing less profit, which means cutting cost and laying off employees in the country it does business, which will impact the unemployment rate of that economy, which will continue the spiral.
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...so, when the POTUS is engaged about European economics with European leaders, he is not seeking fame as the teabaggers would like t think, he is just trying to serve Americans best interest.
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4) The Obama Take Down Enterprise - Covert Operations, The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama by Jane Mayer
When you have the kind of money these assholes have, you have the power to buy and sell anything. You have the power to change ignorant minds and the minds of low information voters. You have the power to shape the news. You have the power to make people work against their self interest.
At every step of the way in the last 22 months, the Koch Brothers have been at every corner of the Obama's Administration face resisting anything this administration has been trying to do, contributing funds to teabaggers and racist to cause an upraise that will help their greed.
Who the fuck are this people anyway? Covert Operation, linked above, says it all about how much this people are in the center of the teabagging shady movement with their billions.
In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.
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The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a "kingpin of climate science denial." The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.
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Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, "The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."
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The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, "The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement." With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, "everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power." The Kochs, he said, are "trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies."
[Read this article. It is long but worth it and an eye opening.]
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...and I am just hearing about these mothafookers just recently. Covert but not any longer!
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5) The Pending Home Sales Narrative and $8,000 tax credit incentive:
It is logically reasonable to anticipate that when you have less incentive to purchase a home, you will tend to wait to get the best bargain at your own time and not be driven by an $8,000 tax credit incentive that expired a couple of months ago. That is the narrative that is missing when pundits project a huge gap when they compare pending home sales between 2009 and 2010.
It is also logically reasonable to recognize that the $8,000 tax credit incentive has made a huge impact in stabilizing the declining home values by creating a market for the many inventory of homes that were for sale because of economic hardship that hit the main street, preventing bankruptcies and allowing hard hit folks the ability to liquidate their equity. In fact, the $8,000 tax incentive has made one of the nations top home builder, Toll Brothers, profitable for the first time in 3 years and its Chief Executive Douglas Yearley Jr. stated, "much of this quarter's profitability was due to tax benefits."
If you read this article though, the doom and gloom narrative is unbearable:
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Sales of existing houses plunged by a record 27 percent in July as the effects of a government tax credit waned, showing a lack of jobs threatens to undermine the U.S. economic recovery.
Stocks tumbled and Treasury securities rallied, sending yields on 10-year notes to the lowest in 17 months, on concern the industry at the heart of the financial crisis will lead the nation back into a recession. Recent reports on jobless claims and manufacturing point to a slowdown in growth that may prompt the Federal Reserve to consider additional moves to boost the economy.
"Today’s data do not bode well for home prices," said Michelle Meyer, a senior economist at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research in New York. "There is a decent chance we reach a new bottom for home prices. There’s going to be a prolonged, painful drop."
But if you read this article by the National Association of REALTORS: Pending Home Sales Rise, you get a different picture.
September 02, 2010: Following a sharp drop in the months immediately after expiration of the home buyer tax credit, pending home sales have modestly risen, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The Pending Home Sales Index,* a forward-looking indicator, rose 5.2 percent to 79.4 based on contracts signed in July from a downwardly revised 75.5 in June, but remains 19.1 percent below July 2009 when it was 98.1. The data reflects contracts and not closings, which normally occur with a lag time of one or two months.
Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, cautioned that there would be a long recovery process. "Home sales will remain soft in the months ahead, but improved affordability conditions should help with a recovery," he said. "But the recovery looks to be a long process. Home buyers over the past year got a great deal, and buyers for the balance of this year have an edge over sellers. For those who bought at or near the peak several years ago, particularly in markets experiencing big bubbles, it may take over a decade to fully recover lost equity."
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...so, be careful who and what you read.
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PS: Bold type is diarist's emphasis within all the quotes.
My two cents...just because the Right wing corporate misinformation enterprise is in full force geared to reclaim power and shitting in our face with all the lies and deceits, it does not mean we can't be vocal and get the records straight and fight for what is ours. When we go out canvassing, talking to our families, friends and colleagues, we must speak the inconvenient truth. And, YES WE WILL!
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Last but not least...consider this as a tip...good news you may have just not paid attention to from yesterday:
Last week's generic congressional poll from Gallup got a lot of attention because it suggested Republicans were ahead by a landslide with only two months until election day. And this week? Suddenly the parties are tied again.
