The 1% only care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else

dean baker...

It's time to expose the lies for what they are. The One Percent have rigged the deck over the last three decades to accomplish the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. These are not people who care about budget deficits or free trade or free markets. They care about making themselves richer at the expense of everyone else.

i know i'm being completely unrealistic, but wouldn't it be nice to see the views of someone like dean baker competing with the views of the 1% on traditional news media outlets...? i have to ask myself, why is that not happening...? the answer, obviously, is that the 1% control the traditional news media...

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A union member, a CEO and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table with 12 cookies

the only part of the following i have a quarrel with is where he says, "our military spending grabs 11 cookies"... it may seem like a small thing, but all of the money that nominally goes to the military actually doesn't... it goes to the defense contractors who are headed - mostly behind the scenes, of course - by our super-rich elites who are highly motivated to keep the rivers of cash flowing...

A union member, a CEO and a Tea Party member are sitting at a table with 12 cookies. The CEO grabs 11, turns to the Tea Partier and says “The Union's out to take your cookie!”

I've been thinking that the joke applies pretty well to another situation. For instance, the military. Our military spending grabs 11 cookies and leaves us all battling over the 12th.

Christopher Hellman at TomDispatch added up all the military-related spending in the budget and came to a startling number: for fiscal year 2012, the actual military budget is something like $1.2 trillion dollars.

Trillion with a T.

Just to put that in perspective for a second, a million seconds is 12 days. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

So after all that cash is gone, what are we left with? Not a whole heck of a lot for the rest of us. “Discretionary” spending is nearly 40% of the budget, but if Hellman's numbers are accurate, that $1.2 trillion eats up nearly 90% of discretionary funds, leaving just 10% for the rest of us. (That doesn't include mandatory spending on things like Social Security and Medicare, which are separate.)

on the plus side, i think it's critical for us to understand that the current fiscal dilemma that the federal government, states and municipalities find themselves in (to say nothing of the fiscal dilemma most of us average peasants find OURSELVES in) is a direct result of our slavish devotion to insuring those rivers of cash keep flowing to those already super-rich elites whether they be defense contractors, bankers or hedge fund managers... the full extent of the nasty picture is only beginning to dawn on the american people but, ya know, it ain't that difficult to see if you only bother to look...

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from truthout...

"Austerity" Comes to America

Richard Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and currently a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York. He has a PhD in Economics from Yale University as well as degrees from Harvard University (history BA) and Stanford University (economics MA). Wolff has authored or co-authored 10 books and over 50 scholarly articles and 75 popular articles. His recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis.

His documentary film on that crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, can be previewed at www.capitalismhitsthefan.com. He also published a book of essays on the current crisis in 2010 entitled Capitalism Hits the Fan: the Global Economic meltdown and What to Do About it. Detailed information on and copies of his many writings, audios and videos of his media interviews, lectures, and classes, and his speaking schedule are all available at his website: www.rdwolff.com.

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Domestic spending freeze...? Obama's jumped the shark...

when i first read the story about obama maybe, possibly, declaring a spending freeze, i thought it might be just a rumor... this morning's headlines made it official...

Obama to Seek Freeze on Some Spending to Trim Deficits

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

i'm no fan of the ballooning deficit and i'm certainly no fan of an increasingly worthless fiat currency that's leaping off the printing presses so fast it's breathtaking... but, in the midst of a super-rich, elite-created economic storm in which businesses, states, and millions of citizens are suffering through furloughs, layoffs, foreclosures, unemployment and the complete wastage of the middle class, to put a freeze on domestic spending while still allowing free rein to our totally out-of-control defense and war spending is perhaps the most unconscionable thing done yet among the many disturbingly unconscionable things done by this president...

i'm glad to see krugman shares some of my utter dismay...

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

this is one of the reasons i've slowed way down on blogging... my psyche is evidently too fragile at the moment to be able to regurgitate abominations of this magnitude...

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Stop mincing words... The U.S. is bankrupt and printing more worthless dollars ain't gonna fix it... Meanwhile, the WaPo stays context-free...

wake up and smell the coffee...

Deteriorating economic conditions will cause the federal deficit to soar past $1.8 trillion this year and leave the nation wallowing in a sea of red ink far deeper than the White House had previously estimated, congressional budget analysts said today.

[...]

And although Obama would come close to meeting his goal of cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term, the CBO predicts that the nation's annual operating deficit would never drop below 4 percent of the overall economy over the next decade, a level administration officials have said is unsustainable because the national debt would grow too rapidly.

By the CBO's estimate, for example, the nation's debt would grow to 82 percent of the overall economy by 2019 under Obama's policies, compared with a pre-recession average of 40 percent.

what's wrong with this story...?

well, for starters, how about the total failure to mention the connection of the national debt to the failed federal reserve system which is the creditor to which the u.s. must pay the debt, the privately-owned money printing machine that holds us all in economic thrall...

oh, yeah, and, btw, there's also the matter of the REASON for the soaring national debt, namely, that the u.s. is borrowing all that money from the federal reserve in order to prop up the friggin' PRIVATE BANKING AND FINANCIAL INTERESTS that feed from the federal reserve trough... interestin', eh...?

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