The President's Weekly Address: Crossroads on the Economy

From the White House blog:

The President lays out the choice between his plan to keep our economy moving forward, and the agenda put out by Republicans in Congress taking us backward to the special interest economy that created this mess.

No one highlighted this better this week than Jon Stewart. He took the "Pledge" from the GOPers and compared it to what they said in the past. Almost word for word, everything in this so called new pledge is exactly what they have said before.

John Boehner himself said, "We are not going to be any different than before". Now that is telling isn't it.

If people would just see this and realize how little new the GOPers have... surely they won't vote for them. How anyone could look at it and see they are wanting to take us back and act like everything didn't happen the way it did. Mostly due to their incompetence, spending and tax cuts.

I usually don't add anything to this, but as I said Jon did it so well, I think it bears watching.. So I am adding his take on the Pledge to the President's Address. Watch and behold why he has been voted the most trusted man in the news.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Postcards From the Pledge
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Like I commented at Sue's blog, New GOPers, just like the Old GOPers... no new ideas, not listening to the people and nothing to offer at all.

Why the DSCC Loves Sarah Palin

This is from Shannyn Moore and AKM (Mudflats) They are asking us all to share this and if we can to donate to Scott McAdams. Please do what you can.. This is a Senate seat we can win... and we need all the seats we can get.

It’s mind-boggling how the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hasn’t shown up for Scott McAdams, Alaska’s Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

They’ve had weeks to help secure a now open seat they didn’t think they had a prayer to take. Why aren’t they fighting for Alaska? Lisa Murkowski asked McAdams where his DSCC support was. When it didn’t show, she threw back in as a write-in candidate.

The front page of their website features a picture of Sarah Palin. Fear of her brand of crazy has been an ATM for the DSCC. They’ve raised millions off of Palin word salads with guano dressing. The DSCC website also has a link to Palin’s anointed Alaskan proxy for US Senate, Joe Miller, but they haven’t supported his opponent.

Alaska is the cheapest place in the country to run a campaign. One hundred dollars of campaign money in such a small market is equivalent to $2,000 for a race in Texas. With Palin’s negative numbers over 50%, her candidate, Joe Miller, is vulnerable. The Tea Party is recruiting people with “Lisa M” type names to run a write-in, and every Murkowski vote will be challenged by their attorneys. It will make the Franken/Coleman recount look like play-dough hour in kindergarten.

52% of Alaska’s voters are registered independent or undeclared. Nate Silver thinks Murkowski could win a write-in campaign? He’s wrong about Alaska – again. Ask NOT-Congressman Ethan Berkowitz. Silver projected Ethan would best incumbent Don Young in 2008. He didn’t.

Nationally, both Democrats and Republicans are underestimating Sarah Palin. The DSCC and others do this at their own peril. There is a chance to drive a political stake through the heart of the Palin king-maker meme. I realize Palin is a money maker, but neutering her politically by electing a Democratic Senator in Alaska is priceless.

Please help Alaska take our state forward. Save yourselves. Support Scott McAdams for U. S. Senate. Contribute to Scott McAdams campaign.

Call the DSCC and ask them to FINANCIALLY support Alaska’s democratic candidate. 202-224-2447 Email them at info@dscc.org.

Please take a minute and show your support for a good Democratic candidate. So far the DSCC is NOT giving him any financial support. We can win this seat if we can help him. Even if you can't donate, at least send an email or make a phone call to the DSCC... They send us emails all the time asking for money. But are not using it in markets where it can make a huge difference.

The President's Weekly Address: The Republican Corporate Power Grab

From the White House blog:

The President explains how the most dire warnings about the Citizens United case have been proven valid as Republicans in Congress have blocked legislation to fix it.

The last paragraph says why this is so important.

But more than that, you can make sure that the tens of millions of dollars spent on misleading ads do not drown out your voice. Because no matter how many ads they run – no matter how many elections they try to buy – the power to determine the fate of this country doesn’t lie in their hands. It lies in yours. It’s up to all of us to defend that most basic American principle of a government of, by, and for the people. What’s at stake is not just an election. It’s our democracy itself.

Again... What's at stake is not just an election. It's our democracy itself. I think this is the most important line. If we don't stand up and get out the vote, we are going to be letting these corporations run our country. Is that what you want.

I don't, I don't want some CEO telling me what I can and can't do, what I can and can't buy. Where I can go. Believe me this isn't paranoia speaking, this is what will happen more than it has ever happened before, if we allow this election and subsequent ones to be stolen by these no name no face big money ad buyers. They are setting the tone for this election.

I am sure you have seen some of them, I know I have. The names sound wonderful in some cases, Americans for American Values for one.. Doesn't that sound good... but if you look they are nothing but a front group for some big corporation, such as Koch Industries.

So please, no matter how you feel about the candidate in your state, get out and vote. Don't let these shadow corporations and unknown entities buy this election, or any other. You still have the power to stop it by your vote.

A Message From the Republican Party.

I got this from a friend on FaceBook and thought it was so good I just had to share it with everyone.

Please listen carefully and to the end... I swear you will enjoy it.

The President's Weekly Address: A Day That Tested Our Country

From the White House blog:

The President marks the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks as a National Day of Service and Remembrance to honor those who lost their lives.

* Volunteer in your community through Serve.gov.



Please take a minute to remember in your own way, what today is. Then do something for someone else.

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse, Reagan was Wrong.

A friend pointed me to this Op-Ed from the Aug 1st issue of the New York Times. It is written by David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. This was one of the so called architects of "Trickle Down" economics. Now he has seen the error of his ways.

From the Op-Ed:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

The bolding is mine because I thought that was a great point. We have all seen this happen since deregulation started. After the Glass-Stegal was enacted by FDR, our economy was stabilized and we didn't have the huge bubble and bust recessions we have seen lately. But let Mr. Stockman tell you in his words.

The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.

It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.

It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman’s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.

Oh, SNAP... did he just tell them they were wrong? Let's continue, shall we?

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

In 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts, matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.

Soon, the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion

Through the 1984 election, the old guard earnestly tried to control the deficit, rolling back about 40 percent of the original Reagan tax cuts. But when, in the following years, the Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, finally crushed inflation, enabling a solid economic rebound, the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.

By fiscal year 2009, the tax-cutters had reduced federal revenues to 15 percent of gross domestic product, lower than they had been since the 1940s. Then, after rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures, George W. Bush surrendered on domestic spending cuts, too — signing into law $420 billion in non-defense appropriations, a 65 percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier.

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Once again, the emphasis is mine... but I think he meant them to be this way. I only wish this had gotten more news when it was written.. However now, I want to make sure we see this.

The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.

But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets

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Deregulation anyone?

The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million. The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in nonfarm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes.

It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.

This was very interesting to me... one of the creators is now crying about it's creation. Seems like Dr. Frankenstein is hating his monster isn't he?

Of course it is pretty obvious why this didn't get more notice.. It goes against the grain of all the financial talk the GOPers are pushing, even the so called "librul" New York Times didn't push it further.. Why not? Why are not all the financial wonder kids talking about this... the fact the designer is hating his fashion..

I know we all knew this... but maybe someone who didn't will read it and think a little about the oft pushed tax cuts solve everything.

The President's Weekly Address: Honoring the American Worker

From the White House blog:

The President talks about his fight to make America work for the middle class and make sure hard work is rewarded -- rather than greed and recklessness .

I think this is great, the President is laying out everything that has been done for the Middle Class and adding some things he wants to get done. I wish more of the people who are claiming he has done nothing would look at this.

Get this to everyone so they learn what the Democrats have done for everyone. I say Democrats because they have had very little if any help from the Republicans. If they can't view the video, here is a LINK to the transcript.

I hope you all have a safe and happy weekend. Enjoy the holiday, but take a minute to thank the ones who are working to see you have a great time and another minute to all who have gone before, making this the greatest country on Earth.