I will retire in two days. I have been a professional and worked for nearly 35 years, put a son through medical school and another through a master’s in engineering, it’s time for me and my wife to rest and do some traveling. Thank you, Herr Chancellor Bush, for pissing away $1.5 trillion you didn’t have to destabilize Iraq, screw the US economic base and generate international goodwill towards our great country. I really look forward to going abroad, where my savings will be worth half what they were two years ago and Americans are nearly universally reviled (unless they say they hate the Bush administration). I am sure this plan to give certain folks $600 or $1200 while their pension savings, if lucky enough to have them, will be hit ten times that hard, but let the big gun corporations continue to pillage the shrinking middle class is a great answer to the problem. Just make sure your crooked sons of bitch banker pals who made bad loans and then sold them as investments aren’t charged with any crimes-like bank fraud. You know how tough it is for these white collar types in a federal lockup. Hey, Reagan and his pals managed to steal $150 billion from America’s Savings and Loans twenty years ago pulling the same scheme, and only Keating got any heat; thousands of elderly Americans lost their life savings. Most Americans that qualify for your $600 rebate will find that it is worthless as pesos. What we, and they need is to quit sending our money out of this country, to quit propping it up by selling it to Saudis and Japanese banks, and start resuscitating the US economy instead of squandering it at the rate of $2 billion a week in your vendetta crusade in the distant desert. I realize that your Reichstadt will do none of this, Chancellor, but I hope that after I am retired for a year, someone will, if there is an America left to save.

I appreciate how this article, which some call not good enough, is actually managing to be a ‘stimulus’ to quite a few........
The mark of a good teacher is to say just enough to ‘stimulate’ the students to think further for themselves....Good Show, Mr. Sirota.

Strive on, Friends..

• Its funny how Mike Moore’s SICKO has stood up to rebuttal, and no one can really argue with it, but Brainwashed Americans can’t seem to get it that the Socialist Countries of Northern Europe have a higher standard of living than us by a huge margin.  Better heath care, more leisure time, they live longer, and consider themselves happier, than Americans by a long shot.
Read this topic with your eyes open, instead of interjecting your expectations before you have a chance to understand.
Totalitarianism, as practiced by China and the former USSR is a form of Gov’t, as opposed to Democracy.  Socialism is a form or Economics, as opposed to Capitalism.  The very successful Socialist nations of northern Europe are all Democratic, and have the opportunity to elect for a Capitalist system, anytime they choose...they choose not to.
We don’t have that freedom here.  We have two parties, both Capitalist, and the only socialism is that practiced for the benefit of the Corporations that benefit the most from our imperialist excursions into domination of the world...marketplace.  The Fed is our most powerful institution, and its sole function is to insure that the Capital stays where it is, and profits flow to the centers of Capital.  The gap between rich and poor is larger than ever, and the percentage of citizens that control the majority of the wealth grows ever smaller.
Or, don’t read this or any other source of the TRUTH about our Corporate Aristocracy, drink the cool aid, take the trinkets they give you, and die with your nose to their grindstone.

are dictating our economic policy.  Since Shrubs been in office, the national debt has gone from 4 $Trillion to almost nine, and an unfunded rebate will probably push it up to $10trillion, which is where i predicted we would end up. Trickle down says the national debt doesn’t matter, because the debt is the taxpayers and not the corporations who get the benefit of the imaginary money dumped into the economy.

This is not brain surgery.  Stop the war. Stop unessecary military spending on vaporware like starwars and abm shields that were relics of the Cold War and are nothing but money drains to the Carlisle Group and the Cheney/Bush Cabal. 

The arsehole poster that suggested we stop student aid needs to go have sex with itself while swinging upside down from a flag pole.  If the richest country on the planet doesn’t have youth as well educated as students were in Iraq before we invaded, then be prepared to live in a third world nation...the US. 

Corporations need to pay for the infrastructure we’ve maintain and the WARS WE HAVE WAGED ON THEIR BEHALF.  Stop Nafta and Cafta.  Stop excesive 1HB workers.  Make illegals legal so they pay taxes and the corporations that use them pay for their workman’s comp and unemployment.  Safetynets are needed for citizens not workers that reduce wages and pay no taxes. 

lastly, you nor I will have any control over our gov’t under the current system so.....

So Far, everything that Bush has had a hand in is a swindle. So far, nothing has truly been for the people, and I don’t make generalizations easily. Knowing the use of propaganda by the Bush administration, I don’t want to make that same mistake.

But what is so sad is that the Democrats are following the same Bush coda. The actions of the Democrats give us no assurance that they will turn around the plutocratic coup that the neocons have wrought by deceit, fear, and lies.

I had such great hope when the Democrats won the midterm elections in 2006. It was like the forces of evil were finally defeated, still leaving an almost toothless tyrant.

Unfortunately the Democrats have allowed his tyranny to continue.

From “The Next Bubble” Harpers magazine, Feb ‘08:
“Since the early 1980’s, the Chicago School has driven policy on the upward slope of an economic boom, but we’re all Keynesians on the way down: rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, tax cuts by Congress, deficit spending and dollar depreciation are deployed in heroic proportions.”

While I don’t agree with this feel good moment for our citizens; IMO, Sirota’s article is just more insubstantial fluff from truthdig.  This “stimulus” is just more smoke and mirrors from an administration known for its lies.  It is continued borrowing and a slide further into debt.  It will be paid with money we (our government) don’t have.  That the dems go along with this is further evidence of their cowardice.  This stimulus is a band aide on a severed artery and until we understand the systemic problem, there will be no solution and we will go down.  We need a brave soul to stand up and address the real problems facing us thanks to our cowardly politicians both republican and democrat.  No present candidate for the presidency has any answers to our failed economic policies.  There are no solutions presented that will really help us and the coming recession is inevitable.  This puts the impetus on us as individuals to start to understand and practice fiscal responsibility.  Only those of us who do will get through this well.  The bottom line is; this administration won’t do the things that will really help:  Extended unemployment benefits, increased food stamp allotments, health benefits for everybody, etc., etc., etc.

Right on.  Who, and I mean WHO, like anyone in congress, actually debate publicly the “need” for a stimulus?  All I hear is the Bush/Pelosi bandwagon of accept it, go for it, it’s a good thing.  Isn’t rebuilding this nation’s infrastructure a priority?  There are unfunded projects on every governors desk to rebuild roads, bridges, etc.. Don’t “give” me my money and tell me to spend it on consumer goods.  What a farce.

I think I’ll just spend it on debt service just to piss them off.  Pay off a little inflated interest on my credit card I had to use during the “boom” to pay for essentials.  Recession?  Recovery?  To some of us it is all the same because the boat goes by either way.

Makes a person wonder how all of this military spending hasn’t stimulated the economy....hmm..

Yes, the American people are pissed off. And they have every reason to be.

This had been getting serious for some time now. I agree that now that Wall Street panics, there will be action, and most likely just the type which benefits Wall Street, but I also have to wonder if it’s not also that Washington and Wall Street so removed from the real world of the common folk that maybe they didn’t realize it was getting so bad. Of course, if they knew their history, they could more clearly see the future, but while average Americans were feeling their paychecks go less and less far every month, perhaps they were still waiting for the statistics to come in…

“Sen. Max Baucus (Mont.) asked economists affiliated with The Hamilton Project—a Citigroup-backed think tank—to testify to Congress at its initial hearings on a stimulus package. Labor economists, by contrast, were not invited.”

Yes this is the same Citigroup demonstrating incompetence regarding the sub-prime issue and which sold almost 5% of its equity to a Middle East company to avoid telling stockholders that their dividends were cut.

A few months back, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the world’s largest Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), paid US$7.5 billion to buy a 4.9 percent stake in Citigroup, the largest financial institution in the United States. Citigroup, facing what the markets fear may amount to a $30 billion or more hit on its capital base due to its problems with subprime mortgages, chose to sale part interest in its company, rather than declare short-term dividend cuts.

A Krugman column in the NY Times indicates how the Democrats again caved in to Bush in accepting a toothless stimulus package providing no help to the needy.

David, you nailed this moronic slight of hand gimmick well. The awful plight of South Carolina Longshoreman, which went unnoticed by the media, was thankfully helped by the Longshoreman of Spain.
As the enterprising moguls take their factories to slave labor countries, nary a word of why we are in need of Economic Stimulus. As G. Anderson so eloquently wrote: “Meanwhile the political minuet in Washington keeps getting more bizarre”

Nice that Nancy Pelosi said that the $150 billion was meant to go mainly to the middle class and that they were so-oo important.

If you consider yourself “middle class”, perhaps you would like to comment on why it appears so evident that the middle class couldn’t give a fuck about anyone else?!?!

Oh, I forgot...... most of “the poor” who would benefit most in the short term don’t even have an address to send a check to, uhh!

• “…..politicians develop “stimulus” schemes using the blight of layoffs, foreclosures and wage cuts to justify tax cuts for those doing the laying off, foreclosing and wage cutting….”

Remember the bailouts of the commercial airline industry after 9/11? They got millions upon millions upon millions. And, they laid off hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of thousands. Anyone who survived the cut has earned less, and less and less, ever since. Benefits have been slashed, and retirement packages crashed into those towers. That was over 6 years ago. They’ve not replaced ANY of those workers. Those who survived the cut, (and haven’t died since), are working for far less money, and working their asses off, with far less help.

And, the consumer continues to pay through the nose, as the price of an airline ticket continues to rise, and the service is the pitts. And, the top dog airline, (the one who collected the MOST of the bailout money – American Airlines) is posting big time profits for their stock holders, and damn proud of it.

We won’t even go into what the ‘stimulus’ and bail outs did for Big Energy. The taxpayers are STILL paying for Enron, and those employees are still screwed.

Nice ‘stimulus’.

Yes, now that it’s wall street, they jump into action.....

But treating the symptoms is not going to do anything about the disease.

The disease is still there, lingering festering under the surface, rotting out the very heart of this country.

That money will be spent in all of about 24 hours, and since we don’t make anything in this country anymore, it’s already on the way to China.

Meanwhile the political minuet in Washington keeps getting more bizarre.

If you really think the best way to help the economy is by letting American’s keep their own money, why don’t you just do that.

Repeal, credit card reform, repeal Bankrupcy reform, repeal Student Loan Reform, Repeal Nafta, Don’t allow mexican trucks to come over the border, repeal overtime reform, stop granting exeptions to corporations who import technical workers, nurses and doctors from abroad, and on and on and on.

But you won’t do that, because you make too much money ripping off the public, and that’s how we got here. Not because we didn’t work our asses off for you, but because your greed can never be satisfied, while we’re expected to do with little.