Tag: stimulus

I have but one question for the Obama loyalists.  Do you guys ever get tired of saluting the flag?   Just because we support Obama and all agree he was 1,000 10 times better than anyone else running doesn’t mean we have to put our brains on a shelf.  

Why did he lie to us, and why aren’t the Democrats holding him accountable?  We are not stupid.  We can see what is going on.   All this distraction about bi-partisanship as if millions of unemployed, broke, and homeless middle class Americans care.

No salary caps for CEOs.  No torturers, war profiteers, or WS crooks going to jail.   Just lots of hot air surrounded by smoke and mirrors.

How about a truth commission on the bailout?

I shouldn’t be surprised by now. But I still was when I read the article this morning in the Washington Post explaining that the cap on executive pay has been removed from the stimulus bill. I knew what Congress was doing yesterday by bringing the Wall Street executives in and scolding them in public was a dog and pony show. But I had not realized how profoundly full of shit these politicians are.

Nationalize the damned banks already.  They’re stealing us blind.  Geithner is a WS insider, and the wrong man for this job. If we aren’t getting tax dodger and Republican appointments, we are getting the cat assigned to guard the canary.  If I have to bailout their sorry asses, I want to own them.  

While we are at it, who did us this favor?

A Sanders-Grassley amendment to demand TARP recipient banks stop firing U.S. workers and replacing them with foreign guest workers was ripped out of the bill.

Last but not least, what’s all this noise about Obama and Social Security?  We can pay for  the Bush war profiteers and the ongoing WS bailout of Washington’s financiers and cronies, but they, by god, are going to save us from the burden of  social security.

You have no idea how bad Democrats are starting to look on the heels of all that campaign rhetoric.  Change  my ass! I am getting sick and tired of all of them and the horses they rode in on.  

Welcome everyone to the latest edition in the Manufacturing series.  I do hope everyone is doing better than our economy.  The President was on television talking about jobs.  He had visited a town in Indiana where the unemployment rate had reached 18%.  The stimulus plan being laid before us, President Obama hopes, will eventually lead to several million jobs. But before we get to the latest on jobs and manufacturing, let’s look at this week’s Numbers.

The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.

A cycle pushing us into a self reinforcing deflationary spiral in which less and less people are able to support the dwindling economy with their purchases which causes even more job loss and less economic activity, and so on, as we saw highlighted in very sharp focus in How Bad? This Bad with the graph from Swampland compiled using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that:

…compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession — showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been.  Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

The response from the government so far, from the Bush administration and the Congress, and continuing through into the new Obama administration, has been attempts at bailouts of the very wealthy in the financial sector, through shoveling money at manufacturers such as the auto industry so they can continue producing products in the face of crippling reductions in sales revenues, effectively “stealing” money from their prospective customers who were already more and more unable to buy their products, to finally with the current administration to an ostensible “stimulus” bill supposedly aimed at “creating” jobs.

All of which has been and is being done by saddling taxpayers, the very people these attempts have been ostensibly aimed at “helping” with long-debunked “trickle down” economics, with enormous and growing crushing future debt and thus crippling their future as well as present ability to purchase products and services, and crippling future prospects for an economic recovery.  

No matter what one’s point of view is on Obama or his policies, there is no doubt that he is under estimating his mandate for change and in real danger of losing the war for the hearts and minds of the people that gave him that mandate.

Frank Rich

Slumdogs Unite!

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

While I don’t think an old dog can learn new tricks, I’ll concede that Obama felt a need to at least “try” for bipartisanship so that he could say he did.   So now that it has failed and Republicans and Blue Dogs have seen how easy it is to beat him, what next?  

Maureen Dowd

Face facts: Republicans cleaned Obama’s clock this week.

In his first weeks padding around a White House that still has nails on the walls waiting for new pictures, and phone and e-mail kinks, Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.  –snip–

The lawmakers had been feeling disillusioned that they were carrying Mr. Obama’s water on the bill, while Obama aides triangulated and promised that the bill would “improve” in the Senate.

Nancy Pelosi told her leadership team that she had told the president, “I don’t mind you driving the bus over me, but I don’t appreciate your backing it up and running over me again and again.”

The same way the man made levees in NOLA were no match for Katrina, the stimulus bill, no matter how big, is unlikely to hold back the destruction brewing in the American economy and just waiting to hit millions of American families across the land.

Just a whimsical post this morning. Several things of varying importance have occurred to me in passing this week. I review the importance of Flag Pins, shirt sleeves and a new description of the Republican strategy for defeating the stimulus package.  You also might want to check out the new word I found to “pin” on Republicans. I share below the Fold. Enjoy!

And by “they,” I mean the Republicans.

The Republicans who are vowing to oppose the stimulus bill.

The Democrats don’t need to learn to avoid bipartisanship.

The Republicans need to learn how to embrace it, and they should learn that lesson quickly.

I wrote about progressive criticism of the stimulus plan last week:

Sen. Harkin: Obama’s Plan looks like “trickle-down”; Summers: “Message Heard, Loud and Clear”  (also, an earlier version on docudharma: https://www.docudharma.com/show…

The message was heard and is being acted on.  Barack Obama and his administration-to-be has been listening to Democrats and now is revising the stimulus plan.

Emerging from a two-hour meeting in the Capitol with Obama advisers Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, Senate Democrats praised the President-elect’s team for agreeing to make changes to its stimulus proposal based off of concerns senators raised last week at a meeting with the president-elect’s senior aides.

Politico: Big changes to Obama stimulus plan

More, after the fold