Anyone who donates to either arm of the ruling elites political branch is guilty of a treasonous act for providing aid to the enemy

Re Truthdig: “Democratic and Republican parties are experiencing a unique form of financial comeuppance, as the economic recession they were in charge of preventing. . . is causing a dramatic drop in the level of political donations.”

Unlike Europe, America doesn’t have a safety net so this makes sense.

In Ezra Klein’s, “How Safety Nets Protects Against Fiscal Collapse,“ Laura Tyson, a member of the Volker Commission, “draws an interesting contrast between the impact the economic crisis has on American consumers and European consumers.”

The contrast relates to “safety net” differences between American and European consumers – the Europeans have a “safety net” and Americans do not. As such, Tyson suggests America is much more vulnerable to recession than Europe.

“The economic impact of Lehman’s collapse, she says, was multiplied because it devastated the financial system’s confidence in its own survival. The analogy holds to our safety net, where consumer reactions to fiscal instability are multiplied because they can’t be certain of their economic survival.”

“A consumer afraid of losing her health care and her child’s college education and her income will pull much further back than a consumer who feels the fundamentals of her existence are secure.”

“As evidence, she brought up every economist’s favorite bugaboo: Japan’s lost decade. It was bad for growth, she argued, but not particularly devastating to individuals. “The Japanese households, in the last decade and a half, they never experienced the economy the way economists experienced it,” she said. “The economist saw the economy as in dire shape. You asked the average Japanese person if they were in dire shape, they didn’t see it that way.”

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein