It is well that we should have a jobs program. Perhaps we would do well to have young people in uniforms building bridges and other such infrastructure, but I find a bloated security and intelligence bureaucracy in conjunction with a regimented works progress program to be rather creepy. I am curious as to what we are evolving toward.

Vote them out with majority rule power.  38% are registered in the combined two parties.  62% are non-partisan.
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Where ya been the last 25 years?????  Haven’t you ever heard of the “George Will Rule”?

Will put it best: No matter what the policies or qualities of the candidates, 40% of the public will vote Republican. 40% will vote democratic.  The White House is won or lost on that middle 20%.

Not 62%, but 20% is up for grabs.  (and Perot almost got that in 1992).

This is not a hard one to figure out.  The math is simple.

A healthy economy is a good economy, and ending the military red ink against all proper policy, and restoring the merits of what taxes are for, public interest to benefit Americans, for proper government services, this will fix the economy.

Red ink military sends every aspect of our lives down the tubes, and we are there.

Obama and McCain are the picture IN OFFICE that needs to be voted out by a democracy that understands very clearly the bums do not rule when the Presidential Election is due, November 4th there are six choices, not two, the parties in power do not belong there.  Vote them out with majority rule power.  38% are registered in the combined two parties.  62% are non-partisan.  An outside challenge seen as BEST can WIN the Presidency and he should.  That man is Ralph Nader.  Use the internet to see his track record, do the search engine and pick your favorite topics.  He will restore sanity to our policies and offer honest and good leadership as well as wisdom earned over a lifetime of selfless service in the public interest as a private attorney working only for the public interest, and yes, he has achieved milestones.  Politics is due his lead.

Vote for Nader for President and expect the BEST to be seen and voted for…make these two weeks count to win a President by the people.

bobar, October 18 at 7:43 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

When you build a house, you don’t start with the roof!  Without jobs this house of cards will continue to colapse.

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You don’t believe in trickle down?  Where do you think it goes?  After all, piss flows downhill!

In terms of your claim, let us, for the sake of argument, restrict our attention to the NYSE.  There is, to the best of my knowledge, no relationship between the money supply and the total capitalization of the NYSE (i.e. the price value of the total number of shares for each of the companies being traded there); nor do I think that the Fed has ever tried to adjust the money supply on the basis of such a total market capitalization figure.  Thus, the money was “there” as long as the markets “wanted it to be there.” A year ago they wanted this; now they don’t (for a variety of complex reasons, as cooler heads like Stiglitz and Krugman keep trying to explain).
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No, of course not.  You are right about that.  The link is indirect.  Credit dries up, companies and funds have to get money somewhere so they sell stocks. This is EXACTLY what happened: To pay off debts stocks were sold. Too much supply, not enough demand, the price collapses.  The compression of the MS is not a result but a CAUSE of the collapse.

Then, if companies can’t run because they can’t get commercial paper, they close even though on paper they are solvent.  And people lose jobs, feeding the vicious downward spiral.

A large part of value is TOTALLY in the mind. Is your plasma TV valuable? To you maybe, but not to monk sworn to poverty and simplicity.  I like my motorcycle.  Would you give 2 cents for one? Lots of people would—far more wouldn’t.

A harsh lesson people selling homes learn: Your house isn’t worth 1 dollar more than somebody is willing to pay for it. Period.  Been down THAT road a couple of times!

Inherit the Wind, to say that the money vanished is not quite right.  I remember listening to an interview on MORNING EDITION after the dot-com bubble-burst, when the announcer (probably Bob Edwards) asked his guest, “Where did all the money go?”  The answer:  “It was never there in the first place!”

In terms of your claim, let us, for the sake of argument, restrict our attention to the NYSE.  There is, to the best of my knowledge, no relationship between the money supply and the total capitalization of the NYSE (i.e. the price value of the total number of shares for each of the companies being traded there);  nor do I think that the Fed has ever tried to adjust the money supply on the basis of such a total market capitalization figure.  Thus, the money was “there” as long as the markets “wanted it to be there.”  A year ago they wanted this;  now they don’t (for a variety of complex reasons, as cooler heads like Stiglitz and Krugman keep trying to explain).

I suppose, in some perverse way, you could say that there is little difference between my believing that my portfolio has value and Bush believing that he is doing God’s will!

FC:

You mistake the combo of idiotology and incompetence for a deep, dark conspiracy.  It’s not that I don’t think Cheney is dark enough for it: I just don’t think Bush and his team are smart enough.

This financial collapse isn’t a plan, it’s a consequence of the idiotology that “Ronald Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

The money didn’t go to the Bourgoisie—A little bit went to the upper class in stock options and golden parachutes.  The rest actually just….VANISHED!  I know this sounds crazy but it’s true—the money supply (MS1) is way, WAY down due to this collapse.  I’m no whiz on how the MS1 is calculated but I’d bet season football tickets that the “velocity of money” has slowed to a crawl. (That’s how fast a dollar moves through the economy—from a client to your company to your paycheck to your supermarket to their bank…etc)

This why Wall Street is nutz.  Holding companies can only get cash to pay off debts because credit has collapsed by dumping stocks on Wall Street.  Prices collapse.  Wealth is literally vanishing overnight—and most of it isn’t going anywhere.

It is still unreasonable to compare Hitler in Russia to Bush today.  A more reasonable comparison might be to Hitler in 1934 and 35 when he was consolidating power.  Also, it is becoming clear even to a depressed skeptic like me that even Bush is realizing that his time is done, his power is already waning—witness how, in the financial bailout, we effectively had THREE presidents—Bush and the two candidates.  This is because much of a President’s power is due to how others with power perceive him—and it’s clear they see him as yesterday’s news.  Come January, Bush will be packing, but BOTH Obama and McCain will be staying on in Washington, one as President (hopefully Obama), the other in the Senate. BOTH will retain real power, but Bush won’t.

I am finally beginning to believe that even Bush won’t be able to come up with some kind of scheme to seize power—even the financial mess didn’t allow him to do that.  With both Obama and now McCain running AGAINST Bush and the last 8 years, the nation and even the military (key to a coup) won’t tolerate an interruption of the process.

OK, I’ll go back to my original disagreement with you: As much as I agree that Bush is the most fascist President and administration ever in the US, he’s far from the most fascist in the world.  Just look at China or Russia.  China is desperately trying to white-wash the milk scandal by preventing lawsuits short-sightedly not seeing that they’ll NEVER export milk products again or many food products if the rest of the world doesn’t see an correcting mechanism.  But politicians and business are in bed together.  Russia?  Vladimir Putin is what the US would be like if George Bush had brains and a sharp intellect and wasn’t intellectually lazy.  We’re better off.

And those are the great powers…..

ITW: The Bush/Cheney Reichstag has approached the Nazi Axis as the most fascist country in the world’s history; there are more totalitarian regimes elsewhere and have been, but in the world, now, there is none bigger. The Blitzkreig tanks of the steppes and North Africa and Luftwaffe do not hold a candle to the Shock and Awe of the Bush Invade and Occupy forces. A trillion dollars for one front of war alone, in one country. A military budget that exceeds the rest of the world’s combined by 20%. So many secret police agencies that we do not know how many there are, and the ones that we do know of are spying on citizens without court orders or subpoenas. There are prisons all over the globe, run by the CIA and NSA that are filled with foreign nationals secretly rendited, and torture is commonplace. The Constitution, once sacred, is now obsolete; Abu Ghraib is the legacy we will be remembered for in Iraq after the civil war there is over and the country partitioned. Bush and Cheney have broken more laws than any executive in history including Nixon or Clinton, and were never tried for high crimes because our country has been paralyzed by a new McCarthyism.
Now, a new economic terrorism from within has struck, and Bush is the architect along with Greenspan, Bernancke, Paulson, Cheney, and others. They have a few months left in the bunker before the fall, and they have managed to pull the ultimate October surprise: They stole all the remaining capital from the American workers and gave it to the American Bourgeiosie. This ‘bailout’, in fact a collapse of capitalism, is the final chapter in the fascist Mein Kampf of George W Bush. I only hope that the workers will be able to build a new order on the ashes of the old after the depression he brings runs its course.

Haven’t you heard?  Joe the Plumber is the new “entrepreneur”.  But Joe the Plumber isn’t a plumber. He isn’t a plumbing contractor and he is NOT a member of the Plumbers’ Union, though he claimed to be. He owes back-taxes and pretended to be “undecided” so he could shill for McCain and ask Obama a tough question….which he got wrong.

If I could make $250,000/year as a carpenter, I’d go grab my hammer and saw and kiss my desk job good-bye!  And I wouldn’t give a DAMN if when I crossed that $250,000 net income threshold that I had to pay more in taxes!

FC: We do NOT have the most fascist government on the planet by any means. Many are far worse (check out Bashir in Sudan).  We DO, however, have the most fascist government in our nation’s history (by a LONG shot!)

The Bush Bailout has coopted the resources of the American workers, without their consent and in defiance of their opinions, to Wall Street gamblers who have already evaporated all of their own phony wealth and demanded more from their puppet godheads Paulson and Bush. Like the unimaginative figureheads they are, both McPalin and Obama went along with the new economic terrorism exercise, the new emergency, and Congress has handed Wall St a blank check for our children’s futures. Our children that won’t have jobs or educations because of it.

Unemployment in my county is at 8 percent and has been on a rising spiral for years under the Reichstag. The illusion that nothing was wrong with our economy was never lost on me, I have avowed a socialist paradigm and Labor party for decades. My environmental engineer son waits tables in a restaurant for minimum wage plus tips. My hematologist/physician son works in a North Carolina hellhole at age 31 for $4,000 per month. They are lucky, they have jobs, many of my friends have kids their age with college degrees and no jobs, I know of only one with no degree who works and she is a part-time waitress living with her parents at age 24.

We need the Works Progress Administration to be re-established and the National Youth Administration along with it. The Civilian Conservation Corps is another project that deserves consideration in rural areas. There is a need for a New Socialist Deal, with the worker as the centerpiece and putting people to work at living wages, in improved working conditions, on rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of America (instead of destroying that of Iraq). Nationalizing our banking industry is a good start to bring the greed disease of the death throes of capitalism under control, but it must not stop there: We owe our workers for their trillions of stake they have been forced to put up a national health care underwritten by the government-and every dime of premiums paid for private health care written off of taxes. Every American deserves a guarantee of full employment-and not manning a gun in some trumped-up lie war oversees-here at home. Both the candidates sold out the worker by buying into the Wall St sellout. Now, we must demand a quid pro quo from the victor of the election: Paulson, the greed czar, must go. Benancke must go. The SEC dismantled and CEOs jailed for securities fraud for taking huge bonuses when their companies posted losses.

The most fascist government on the planet, Bush and his cabal, have resorted to socialism to save their rich friends and made possible a Dictatorship of the Protetariat. We cannot let this opportunity, however painful, to pass; as workers it is our duty to seize the means of production even as our capital is stolen from us and turn this country into a real, socialist ideal.

I’ve been telling my family and friends this for twenty years. It’s simple, bring back all the jobs that NAFTA cost us. The tax base would increase, Social Security would once again be solvent and the “credit crisis” would repair itself. Boy was Ross Perot right. Nothing but a huge sucking sound and it’s still sucking US under. We cannot let our manufacturing base die off to nothing. WTF? Why can’t Washington see this? Im justa dum ole UAW retiree and I figgered it out all by meself. (w/o a Harvard diploma)

Hulk

Joe six pak is sooo last week(it’s joe THE PLUMBER now)I wonder if a post I read this morning on Huff post is true that this Joe the plumber is a long lost relative of Charles Keating?

People are just waking up to the fact that not only is trickle down economics not working, free market medicine is an abject failure as well! A 5000 dollar tax break for a 12000 dollar policy(and that’s just this years price, not including co-pays and deductables) Hell, for most americans that extra 7000 dollars might as well be 70,000 or 700,000 thousand, because we can’t afford that either.

It’s time the dimmos did make this a class war! Because at the end of the day, that’s what it is.

Anybody notice that Obama described a health plan, and he based it on an existing structure, the Federal employees’ health plan, so a new bureaucracy doesn’t need to be created?

What was McCain’s plan—give you $5000 towards a $12,000 plan (that you didn’t have to buy beforehand).  The other part of McCain’s plan was to attack Obama’s plan as “too expensive for Joe the Plumber”.  That was it.  Finished.

Marie, what you are writing about is what Japanese broker Masatoshi Sato referred to as “the real economy” (although you may only have heard about him if you include Al Jazeera English among your sources).

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/10/atte ntion-has-now-shifted-to-real.html

As I put it on my blog:  “Sato-san’s ‘real economy’ is the economy where ‘real people’ (rather than the once and future ‘Masters of the Universe’ in the financial sector) have to make basic purchases for food, clothing, and shelter.”  Needless to say, you could have flunked Economics 101 and still come away realizing that you need an income source in order to make those purchases, which is where your arguments about jobs come into the picture.  What concerns me is that we may have become too far gone in the confidence games played by those “Masters of the Universe” to regain our footing in such a “real economy.”

Consider the following:  On a global scale the bank that may well have suffered the LEAST from the current crisis may well be Grameen Bank:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/10/why- grameen-bank-can-continue-through.html

The reason for this (at the risk of sounding too reductive) is that Grameen is still based (quoting again from my own blogging) on “an exchange system that is still grounded in the more concrete realities of cows and chickens.”  The economic engine of the United States is no longer grounded in manufacturing or agriculture.  Indeed, it is no longer grounded in anything that Economics 101 would call “goods.”  Worse yet, most of the “services” that have displaced the position of those “goods” have either been shipped overseas or subjected to devastating cuts in resources.  This leaves the United States with a very narrow band of service providers in the financial sector who do little more than manipulate people’s belief systems over the value of “fictions of convenience,” such as currencies, stock futures, and commoditized packages of debt.  Our economy is so far from reality that, were it being analyzed by a psychiatrist, it would be deemed psychotic without a moments thought!

Thus, while your call for a jobs package is admirable, there is a serious underlying question:  “Jobs for what?”  The fact is that we need to rethink the very nature of our political economy beginning with its very foundations.  One approach (which is sure to get many of our “true patriots” foaming at the mouth) is to revisit Karl Marx’ “Critique of the Gotha Program” and consider what his famous motto (“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”) is trying to say.  Grameen Bank knows how to think in terms of needs and abilities and still make a profit.  Can our country think in similar terms and find its way back to living under a “real economy?”

The economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research writes:

Okay, we all should be glad that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seems to have abandoned, or at least sidelined, his Troubled Asset Relief Program and instead decided to directly inject capital into the banking system. The problem is under-capitalized banks, and that is best solved by giving the banks more capital.

But there is a big issue about the terms under which they were given capital. Secretary Paulson decided that a five percent rate of return on preferred shares was good enough for the taxpayers. Warren Buffet got a 10 percent return for his investment.

No one would confuse Henry Paulson for Warren Buffet, but come on—he could get a four percent return buying treasury bonds. I can’t believe that he had such bad business sense when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs.

The markets gave Paulson’s investment strategy a big thumbs down from the taxpayer perspective. Goldman Sachs shares jumped 10.7 percent after the details were made public. Shares of Bank of America rose 16.4 percent, and Citigroup’s stock rose 18.2 percent. Obviously, the market thinks that Paulson gave the banks a really good deal.

It also seems unlikely that the executive compensation restrictions will have much effect. I doubt that we will hear about any top executives getting big pay cuts because of the bailout, but I will be very happy to be proven wrong.

In short, it seems that we have a whole new group of welfare dependents. Forget Reagan’s mythical welfare queen who drove a Cadillac. These folks have private jets and homes on the Hamptons. And they wreck banks and economies for a living.

The CEOs who pull 8 digit bonuses when times are good and 8 DIGIT parachutes when times are bad is the beginning of the problem. It’s the greed of those same people that sway their decisions to go after uber risky ventures. And what do they have to lose if their wrong? They still get a multi-million dollar parachute if they’re fired. I wish I could take outlandish risks at my company and not have to pay any serious financial consequence if the company tanked.

The bigger issue is that the government allowed it all to happen and promoted it when it was good…I think we all did a little when the markets were artificially high…did no one see this coming?

No, there was decent…but those people are made out to be stupid.

I didn’t think looking more than 3 weeks into the future was a bad thing…do you?

PS: I’m Praying for those that lost their jobs and are hurting because of these devious wall street thieves and their counterparts in this political circus.

All Mac has left is to fall back on the old repug standards of the three G’s, and abortion. The rhetoric could get really mean spirited in the next weeks. Don’t be shocked if Mac and the boys go on a classic Vietnam style slash and burn, kill ‘em all let god sort them out kinda stuff. He has always been a man of very little character, so don’t be surprised if this philandering half-wit flies his plane kamikasi style into the nearest bus load of nuns right before election day.

And don’t sell yourself short, hippy pam, I am sure that in certain circles you would still be considered quite the desirable victim.

Marie has it right on this subject. However, she doesn’t offer solutions either. The next president will have to work very hard to find a surefire resolution to the increasing joblessness in this country. We all know who cares more about the poor, and is intelligent enough to get a plan acted out effectively.

His name is Barack Obama.

At least-during last nights debate-OBAMA talked about HIS PLANS…..as opposed to McCain who just continued his fumbling attacks on ANYTHING and EVERYTHING and [as I see it] never did tell me WHAT HE WOULD DO[except to OVERTURN ROE V WADE]-and IF I EVER GET RAPED[at my age that is unlikely]....I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR THE RAPE KIT…..We Do Not Want Her[McCains choice of running MATE] Either…..