Debtocracy

Here's the Greek Documentary that explains the causes of the debt crisis and proposes solutions, hidden by the government and the dominant media. Aris Hadjistefanou and Katerina Kitidi talk to economists, journalists and celebrities from around the world outlining the steps that led Greece to the debt trap, the chreokratia.


Debtocracy International Version by BitsnBytes

The Story of Broke

Another piece from Annie Leonard who produced The Story of Stuff

Why I Support Occupy Wall Street

A Different Kind of Bombing...

I'm talking here about the kind of bombing - failing - that the right is demonstrating in recent polls. This seems a pertinent observation in light of the most recent GOP presidential candidate debates.

For example, we have the Bloomberg/ WaPo poll here which shows a tremendous LACK of confidence in the conservatives to improve our economy.

1. If a Republican were president right now, do you think the economy would be better, worse, or about the same as it is now?

             Better   Worse   The same   No opinion
All adults     23      25         45           7 

and THAT includes Republicans and right-leaning Independents!

So, not only do the Republican and Tea Party members of congress have lower approval ratings and higher disapproval ratings than the Democrats, they don't have any faith that Republicans would have made  it better, and a higher percentage - 25% - believe the right would have made things WORSE.

But I particularly liked this question, both parts equally:

3a. Of the following possible Republican candidates for president, which one do you think would do the most to improve the economy?

All adults   Leaned GOP 
Mitt Romney                17            22
Herman Cain                10            20
Rick Perry                  7            12
Ron Paul                    7             8
Newt Gingrich               4             6
Michele Bachmann            4             3 
Jon Huntsman                2             *
Rick Santorum               1             1
None of these (VOL.)       16             5
Other (VOL.)                1             *
No opinion                 33            22

3b. Of the following possible Republican candidates for president, which one do you think would do the most damage to the economy?

All adults   Leaned GOP 
Michele Bachmann           15            14 
Rick Perry                 12             9 
Ron Paul                    7            11 
Newt Gingrich               6             5 
Mitt Romney                 5             7 
Jon Huntsman                2             3 
Herman Cain                 2             2 
Rick Santorum               2             1 
None of these (VOL.)        5             5 
Other (VOL.)                3             1 
No opinion                 42            43 

The no opinions are about double what the highest rating to improve the economy scored, and 'none of these' was only a point off - well within the poll's +/- %  range.

I wonder if Mitt Romney would fare as well if the low-information voters who gave him this not-so-high rating in this poll knew that he had selected some of the worst advisors to President 'W' Bush to draft his econimic proposal, and to be his economic advisors?  Or that his foreign policy advisors were pretty much 'W' recycled faces as well.

I bet not, given the numbers who still believe that 'W' was significantly / mostly responsible for our current economic crisis; and that is according to this poll and this poll, and this poll, and a number of other polls in between. That last poll, taken last month shows 50% believe the economy is POOR, with more thinking it isn't good, and with 53% blaming Bush and the Republicans for the problems.

The Republicans are not a party of new ideas, and increasingly as they support the 1%, they are less and less the party of people either.

And THAT is only likely to be a more widespread opinion, as the news gets out about the REAL job performance of 'businessmen' like Herman Cain, who was not it appears the "Captain of Industry" that he represents, according to this examination of his supposed success.   Nor is Romney going to be getting much credit for his career as it relates to jobs, when the facts get more circulation.


According to politifact.com, during Romney's tenure as governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth, one of the very worst states in the country.  And Romney can't really in honesty take credit for improving those stats either.  As an executive at Bain Capital, Romney's company consistently bought companies, and then sold them off piecemeal, resulting in the firing of thousands of people from their jobs as those jobs DISAPPEARED.  Per the Bloomberg report on Cain, his performance wasn't any better for 'creating jobs' while CEO of Godfather's Pizza, and it has ended up worse, in comparison to it's competitors, than when he took over. No one, except someone paid by Herman Cain, thinks his 9-9-9 proposal has a prayer of working as claimed.

So.......for that question about making the economy worse?  Yes, ALL of the Republicans in contention for the presidential race would make it worse. ALL of them; the only questions are: "how very much worse?", and "worse than 'W', or only as bad?".

Class War--You lose!

Elizabeth Warren, candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, made the following statement to the blathering right-wingers at a recent political event.

“I hear all this, you know, Well, this is class warfare. No it isn’t. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” She went on:

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Economic policy in the United States and Europe has failed, and people are suffering.

Economic policy failed for three reasons: (1) policymakers focused on enabling offshoring corporations to move middle class jobs, and the consumer demand, tax base, GDP, and careers associated with the jobs, to foreign countries, such as China and India, where labor is inexpensive; (2) policymakers permitted financial deregulation that unleashed fraud and debt leverage on a scale previously unimaginable; (3) policymakers responded to the resulting financial crisis by imposing austerity on the population and running the printing press in order to bail out banks and prevent any losses to the banks regardless of the cost to national economies and innocent parties.

As reported by Manufacturing and Technology News (September 20, 2011) the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages reports that in the last 10 years, the US lost 54,621 factories, and manufacturing employment fell by 5 million employees. Over the decade, the number of larger factories (those employing 1,000 or more employees) declined by 40 percent. US factories employing 500-1,000 workers declined by 44 percent; those employing between 250-500 workers declined by 37 percent, and those employing between 100-250 workers shrunk by 30 percent. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/

US politicians, such as Buddy Roemer, blame the collapse of US manufacturing on Chinese competition and “unfair trade practices.” However, it is US corporations that move their factories abroad, thus replacing domestic production with imports. Half of US imports from China consist of the offshored production of US corporations.

The wage differential is substantial. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2009 average hourly take-home pay for US workers was $23.03. Social insurance expenditures add $7.90 to hourly compensation and benefits paid by employers add $2.60 per hour for a total labor compensation cost of $33.53.

In China, as of 2008 total hourly labor cost was $1.36, and India’s is within a few cents of this amount. Thus, a corporation that moves 1,000 jobs to China saves $32,000 every hour in labor cost. These savings translate into higher stock prices and executive compensation, not in lower prices for consumers who are left unemployed by the labor arbitrage.

Republican economists blame “high” US wages for the current high rate of unemployment. However, US wages are about the lowest in the developed world. They are far below hourly labor cost in Norway ($53.89), Denmark ($49.56), Belgium ($49.40), Austria ($48.04), and Germany ($46.52). The US might have the world’s largest economy, but its hourly workers rank 14th on the list of the best paid. Americans also have a higher unemployment rate. The “headline” rate that the media hypes is 9.1 percent, but this rate does not include any discouraged workers or workers forced into part-time jobs because no full-time jobs are available.

The US government has another unemployment rate (U6) that includes workers who have been too discouraged to seek a job for six months or less. This unemployment rate is over 16 percent. Statistician John Williams (Shadowstats.com) estimates the unemployment rate when long-term discouraged workers (more than six months) are included. This rate is over 22 percent.

Most emphasis is on the lost manufacturing jobs. However, the high speed Internet has made it possible to offshore many professional service jobs, such as software engineering, Information Technology, research and design. Jobs that comprised ladders of upward mobility for US college graduates have been moved offshore, thus reducing the value to Americans of many university degrees. Unlike former times, today an increasing number of graduates return home to live with their parents as there are insufficient jobs to support their independent existence.

All the while, the US government allows in each year one million legal immigrants, an unknown number of illegal immigrants, and a large number of foreign workers on H-1B and L-1 work visas. In other words, the policies of the US government maximize the unemployment rate of American citizens.

Republican economists and politicians pretend that this is not the case and that unemployed Americans consist of people too lazy to work who game the welfare system. Republicans pretend that cutting unemployment benefits and social assistance will force “lazy people who are living off the taxpayers” to go to work.

To deal with the adverse impact on the economy from the loss of jobs and consumer demand from offshoring, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates in order to create a real estate boom. Lower interest rates pushed up real estate prices. People refinanced their houses and spent the equity. Construction, furniture and appliance sales boomed. But unlike previous expansions based on rising real income, this one was based on an increase in consumer indebtedness.

There is a limit to how much debt can increase in relation to income, and when this limit was reached, the bubble popped.

When consumer debt could rise no further, the large fraudulent component in mortgage-backed derivatives and the unreserved swaps (AIG, for example) threatened financial institutions with insolvency and froze the banking system. Banks no longer trusted one another. Cash was hoarded. Treasury Secretary Paulson, browbeat Congress into massive taxpayer loans to financial institutions that functioned as casinos. The Paulson Bailout (TARP) was large but insignificant compared to the $16.1 trillion (a sum larger than US GDP or national debt) that the Federal Reserve lent to private financial institutions in the US and Europe.

In making these loans, the Federal Reserve violated its own rules. At this point, capitalism ceased to function. The financial institutions were “too big to fail,” and thus taxpayer subsidies took the place of bankruptcy and reorganization. In a word, the US financial system was socialized as the losses of the American financial institutions were transferred to taxpayers.

European banks were swept up into the financial crisis by their unwitting purchase of the junk financial instruments marketed by Wall Street. The financial junk had been given investment grade rating by the same incompetent agency that recently downgraded US Treasury bonds.

The Europeans had their own bailouts, often with American money (Federal Reserve loans). All the while Europe was brewing an additional crisis of its own. By joining the European Union and (except for the UK) accepting a common European currency, the individual member countries lost the services of their own central banks as creditors.

In the US and UK the two countries’ central banks can print money with which to purchase US and UK debt. This is not possible for member countries in the EU.

When financial crisis from excessive debt hit the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) their central banks could not print euros in order to buy up their bonds, as the Federal Reserve did with “quantitative easing.” Only the European Central Bank (ECB) can create euros, and it is prevented by charter and treaty from printing euros in order to bail out sovereign debt.

In Europe, as in the US, the driver of economic policy quickly became saving the private banks from losses on their portfolios. A deal was struck with the socialist government of Greece, which represented the banks and not the Greek people. The ECB would violate its charter and together with the IMF, which would also violate its charter, would lend enough money to the Greek government to avoid default on its sovereign bonds to the private banks that had purchased the bonds. In return for the ECB and IMF loans and in order to raise the money to repay them, the Greek government had to agree to sell to private investors the national lottery, Greece’s ports and municipal water systems, a string of islands that are a national preserve, and in addition to impose a brutal austerity on the Greek people by lowering wages, cutting social benefits and pensions, raising taxes, and laying off or firing government workers.

In addition, in America today savings earn nothing. Indeed, they produce an ongoing loss as the interest rate is below the inflation rate. The Federal Reserve has interest rates so low that only professionals who are playing arbitrage with algorithm-programmed computer models can make money. The typical saver and investor can get nothing on bank CDs, money market funds, municipal and government bonds. Only high risk debt, such as Greek and Spanish bonds, pay an interest rate that is higher than inflation.

For four years interest rates, when properly measured, have been negative. Americans are getting by, maintaining living standards, by consuming their capital. Even those with a cushion are eating their seed corn. The path that the US economy is on means that the number of Americans without resources to sustain them will be rising. Considering the extraordinary political incompetence of the Democratic Party, the right wing of the Republican Party, which is committed to eliminating income support programs, could find itself in power. If the right-wing Republicans implement their program, the US will be beset with political and social instability. As Gerald Celente says, “when people have nothing left to lose, they lose it.”

The New American Revolution Began on the 17th September

17 September 2011 was the first day of "Occupy Wall Street" -- at least a thousand people were in the Wall Street district to protest. There are lots of tweets going on (#OCCUPYWALLSTREET and #takewallstreet). People are getting ready to sleep in the Wall Street district. The police were out in force, guarding all entrances to Wall Street, the famous bull statue, many banks in the area -- that was only the first day; could build over the next month. It is another sign of revolt building.

The website organising this event has the following statement:

We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.

We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.

If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.

If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.

And so we call on people to act

We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.

We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.

We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.

We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.

We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.

We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.

I am not sure who well this event will be covered by USMSM since it threatens the status quo. It did cause the Toronto Star to ask "Is the Arab Spring Coming to America?" That's a good question can social media be used as a means for activating the dormant left wing the way it has been used in other countries? The tea party stands for the rich, not disaffected and impoverished youth--youth who have graduated from university with a pile of debt yet see no future.

One protestor, Lisa Fithian, said she's not part of any official group and that the “occupation” of Wall Street is the work of many people coming together for the same purpose and with the same message. "Wall Street is certainly the heart of why we're here. It's the corporations — the big banks in this country have been destroying this country, Overfees or high mortgages, student loans, the banks are touching every aspect of our lives."

She added that banks and the wealthy have taken money for their own interests and their own survival. “The people here are saying enough of that".

OccupyWallStreet--The American Revolution Begins Sept 17th
Occupy Wall Street: Protests Continue on Day 2
Wall St. Protesters Say They’re Settled In
A real Wall Street takeover threat
Social Networking Spurs Wall Street Protest

Understanding Economics

via Fuck Conservatives

For me, understanding Paul Krugman can sometimes be a bit difficult. I don't have an economics degree and he's a Nobel Prize winner in Economics. It makes sense. Of course our friend Mr. G Guy isn't deterred by any considerations like that. Nevertheless, I'd suggest that anyone who has difficulty with Krugman just wait till Rachel puts it all together. This is clarity itself.


What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

Jon Stewart on Teachers vs. Bankers

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Rise and Fall of the Microsoft Empire

CNN reports on the recent difficulty faced by Microsoft, a difficulty they've not experienced in their entire 23-year history.

Microsoft Corp. said Thursday that declining PC sales hurt revenue, as the software giant reported quarterly sales that fell for the first time in its 23-year history as a public company.

The company has had a difficult time combating slumping demand for its Windows operating system, as the economic slowdown has dragged PC sales down 7% to 9%, according to Microsoft's estimates.

In January, Microsoft announced its first mass job cuts in its 34-year history in an effort to bolster its bottom line The company slashed 1,400 position during the quarter with another 3,600 expected to be cut by mid-2010. At that time, the company said it was also adding a few thousand positions, mainly in its online advertising division.

Do you raise a silent cheer at reading a story like this? Are you one of those iconoclastic types who roots for the downfall of the leader, especially one which has monopolized the market like Microsoft? Do you like companies like Google, Amazon and Yahoo, who although they aren't in direct competition with a software giant like Microsoft, represent the underdog, the come-from-behind, more tenacious competitor?

One area in which they do all compete is advertising. Even there, poor old Microsoft is taking a beating.

Microsoft has also continued to struggle to compete with rivals Google and Yahoo in the online advertising business. Microsoft's Online Services division, which includes the online portal MSN and its Internet advertising sales, lost $575 million in the quarter, and sales in the division were down 14% from the same quarter a year earlier. Microsoft said the loss in its ad sales division was due to the significant decline of average rates in display advertising.

What's your opinion? What operating systems and IT products have you used? I myself have used almost exclusively Microsoft products. It just went that way, not so much by design, but more by default. I guess that's what a monopoly is all about.

Please leave a comment.

Those Crazy AIG Execs

What do you think?

The Wall Street Bailout according to Marcy Kaptur

I haven't written about this because I don't know enough about it to say anything. I can't help but like this video, though, and tend to agree with what the Democratic Representative from Ohio Ms. Marcy Kaptur has to say.

Don't miss those few seconds of George Bush at the end.