Great Recession

New Statistics On Economic Mobility And Income Distribution In America Shows “The American Dream” Is A Myth! :(

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New statistics demonstrate that the concept of “The American Dream”, that anyone can come from poverty to wealth is a myth, now more than ever!

According to the Organization For Economic Cooperation And Development, the average earnings for the top ten percent of Americans are 16 times that of the lowest ten percent of Americans. In Great Britain, the multiple is 8, and in Sweden it is 5.

42 percent of those in the bottom twenty percent of the economic system will never escape it, while in Great Britain, the percentage is 30, and in Sweden it is 25.

Finally, the top one percent of the population, according to this study, has 36 percent of the income, up from 22 percent in 1980. Meanwhile, the average worker has seen income only go up three percent after inflation after these thirty years!

So the idea that somehow the average American can become rich is not facing reality, particularly with the long lasting effects of the Great Recession, which is supposedly over, but is really NOT over by any means! 🙁

46 States Face Bankruptcy: Do The Republicans Have The Answer? :(

Ronald 1 Comment

In an unprecedented situation, 46 states now face bankruptcy, and are being forced to cut government workers and services, raise taxes and fees, and cut government pensions that were guaranteed to workers when they began to work for the state and local governments! 🙁

The states were prevented from such dire straits up to now because of the economic stimulus provided by the federal government, as the result of the initiatives of the Obama Administration!

The Republicans in the House now propose to do no more spending, as they emphasize the federal deficit, something that they caused by their reckless budgets under the Bush Administration, when they were in control of Congress for the first six years! But they also propose to cause more deficit by cutting taxes endlessly, and giving a great gift of most of the tax cut to those who do not need it, will not spend it, and are in many respects, very greedy and selfish! 🙁

So with more deficit being created, while unemployment compensation is not being extended, and hundreds of thousands of workers in state and local government are to be laid off, meaning they have no purchasing power and add to the already burgeoning unemployment rolls, the GOP prescription to do nothing will cause the Great Recession to turn into the Great Depression Number Two! 🙁

The American people are going to suffer mightily under this scenario, whether government workers or the general public! There will be increased crime, more fires not being able to be extinguished, more students per classroom making learning harder than ever, more libraries and parks shut down or cut down in hours, more prisoners released for lack of prison guards and adequate prison facilities! 🙁

All of this creates social dynamite, and the Republicans, who show clearly they only support the needs of the corporations and the wealthy elite, will have created a dangerous situation that might make the troubles of 2008-2010 look like a dream that people would wish for! 🙁

The only states that seem not to have a budget crisis are small states with small population–Alaska, North Dakota and Wyoming–each with only one Congressman state wide–and Arkansas–the so called “Giant” of the group with a grand total of four Congressmen! So only four states with a total of seven House members represent states not having financial difficulties! 🙁

This situation is, obviously, an unmitigated disaster that is bound to get worse, if that is possible to imagine! 🙁

The Ultimate Battleground For The 2012 Presidential Election: The Midwest!

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As a result of the Midterm Elections of 2010, it is becoming clear that the 2012 Presidential Election will be ultimately decided in the Midwest, an area of the country suffering more heavily from the Great Recession, and also an area that is losing a significant number of seats in the House of Representatives reapportionment that will take place, as a result of the Census of 2010!

Even though the Midwest is losing electoral votes because of a smaller relative population as compared to the growing Sun Belt, it still contains states that are among the top ten states in population plus others that are in the next ten states in population!

It is also an area that can presently be described as “purple”, rather than “blue” or “red”, but has moved in the direction of the Republican party in the midterm elections due to the economic hard times and the tendency to blame the party in the White House for the poor economic conditions!

With all of the key Midwestern states electing Republican governors except for Illinois, and many state legislatures and House seats going over to the GOP, it poses a massive problem for the Democrats and President Barack Obama as they look at the electoral scene for 2012!

However, two of those states historically are particularly crucial in a Presidential election–Ohio and Missouri!

Ohio has been the decisive state for the Republican Party, as every Republican President since the first one, Abraham Lincoln, to the last one, George W. Bush, has won Ohio! At the same time, it means that if Ohio goes to the Democrats, as say Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Barack Obama in 2008, the chances of Gerald Ford and John McCain were therefore dashed!

Missouri, if anything, has been the true bellwether state, as every single time since 1900, except 1956 and 2008, the winner of Missouri has become President! And even Dwight D. Eisenhower came close to defeating Adlai Stevenson in Missouri in 1956, and Barack Obama came extremely close to defeating John McCain in Missouri in 2008!

Since the Atlantic Coast of the nation–New England and the Middle Atlantic–is seen as solidly Democratic except maybe for New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and the Pacific Coast also seen as solidly Democratic, while most of the South, maybe all of it including Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, are seen as solidly Republican next time, and much of the Mountain West and Great Plains also solidly “red”, it will be the Midwest which will decide the electoral winner again next time!

So the Democrats and Barack Obama will have to make inordinate efforts to appeal for support in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and cannot afford to lose much of this area if the party and Obama are to win in 2012!

That is one of the reasons why the Democratic Party is planning its national convention in the Midwest in 2012, with St. Louis, Cleveland, and Minneapolis as the key competitors for that honor!

So despite declining population percentages, the heartland of the nation again will be the central focus in the upcoming national elections in 2012!

Corporate Threats On Employees And Politics: 1896 And 2010! Back To The 19th Century! :(

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More than a century ago, corporations were dominating our politics and corrupting it in what was called “The Gilded Age”!

Many corporations pressured employees to vote for the Republican party as the party of big business and its belief in laissez faire capitalism. So when William Jennings Bryan was nominated by the Democrats in 1896, corporations became intimately involved in working to defeat him, depicting him as a socialist, a Marxist, a radical, and an extremist. Many corporations warned their workers that if Bryan was elected, the companies would be firing workers and eventually shutting down!

The tactic worked, and conservative William McKinley won the Presidency, continuing GOP and big business dominance of American politics. Only with his tragic assassination in 1901 did the nation gain Theodore Roosevelt, who represented the beginning of progressive change, including some of the ideas and visions of William Jennings Bryan!

Now, more than a century later, and thanks to the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case in January of this year, corporations are again running amuck in their determination to defeat the Democrats, and reverse the reforms brought about by President Barack Obama! They are spending inordinate amounts of money, and promoting distorted commercials to scare and intimidate voters, either not to vote, or to vote out of fear and trepidation of what Barack Obama represents, a very typical depiction similar to that used against William Jennings Bryan more than a century ago!

But even more outrageous is what one franchise owner of a McDonald’s in Ohio has done–to warn workers that if the Republicans do not win the political races in the state, that their measly pay will be lowered and benefits will be lost! 🙁

This is just one example of how corporations are intimidating their employees and trying to fix the election results, and it is evidence of how labor rights hard won over the past century are now endangered by newly gained corporate powers that make us realize that the Supreme Court is setting the nation backward, before the reforms of the Progressive Era, to the traditional corporate dominance and abuses of the Gilded Age!

Are Americans going to sit back and allow a century of political, social and economic reform to be wiped out by the reactionary desires of corporate America, which caused the Great Depression and the Great Recession? 🙁

Will the Supreme Court be allowed to take us back to the 19th century Gilded Age, and repeal the 20th century? 🙁

One thing is clear: no matter what happens on November 2, the struggle for progressive political, social and economic reform, which many had thought had been won under Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, will have to continue!

We may have to redo old battles for reforms we thought were permanent, and the division that exists in this country may become greater than ever, as progressives cannot allow the return of the 19th century and the Gilded Age without continuing to fight for change!

Will Bill Clinton Be The Savior Of The Democratic Party?

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Former President Bill Clinton, riding on a popular public opinion wave of more than 60 percent, has become the number one weapon of the Democratic Party as it tries to hold on to its majority in both houses of Congress in next week’s midterm elections!

Clinton is doing more campaigning around the country than anyone, and showing up in places in the South and Midwest where Barack Obama would be unlikely to have much impact, were he to campaign there for members and candidates in both houses of Congress.

Clinton brings a sense of good will, and a message: 21 months is not enough time to resolve issues, so give us a full four years to deal with the economic crisis before judging us and deciding to put back in power the people who brought you into the Great Recession!

This is a message that may resonate with voters, and already, there are indications that the so called “enthusiasm gap” may be narrowing, and that Democrats and independents may very well do much better than was expected a few weeks ago!

So if it all works out, we will have to salute former President Bill Clinton as the “savior” of the Democratic Party! 🙂

George W. Bush: His Worst Moment Was Failure To Privatize Social Security? :(

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Former President George W. Bush is about to publish his memoirs, and he claims that his worst moment and greatest failure was his inability to privatize Social Security in 2005!

Can one imagine that? This is Bush’s worst moment? Is Bush delusional? This, if it had happened, would have been a true disaster, particularly considering the stock market collapse in 2007-2008!

But somehow, Bush has conveniently forgotten his real moments of failure:

1. Choosing Dick Cheney to be Vice President for eight years.
2. Failing to be aware through intelligence that was available of the impending attack of September 11, 2001.
3. Choosing to avoid a full commitment to the war in Afghanistan, including the seizure of Osama Bin Laden.
4. Engaging in an unnecessary war in Iraq based on manufactured evidence, and in so doing, strengthening the influence of Iran.
5. Having a slow and inadequate reaction to Hurricane Katrina, leading to the flooding of New Orleans and large areas of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
6. Violating civil liberties at home, and engaging in war crimes in Iraq, and justifying all of it.
7. Causing through lack of regulation the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and nearly causing the total melting down of the American economy, its effects to be on us for the next decade at the least, and burdening President Barack Obama with trying to resolve the mess that Bush left him!

This memoir is just further proof of the total disaster that George W. Bush was in office, and only adds to the feeling that this country was pushed into mediocrity by the corrupt vote count and the intervention of the Supreme Court in the 2000 Presidential election, which denied us Vice President Al Gore as our President!

The US Chamber Of Commerce, Foreign Corporations, And The Conservative Agenda! :(

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News has emerged that the US Chamber of Commerce has been utilizing money from foreign corporations in India, Bahrain, China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Brazil and other locations to finance attack ads against Democrats and the Obama Administration!

American campaign finance laws are being broken in the name of promoting outsourcing of jobs overseas and giving huge tax breaks to multinational corporations! 🙁

The purpose is to elect Republicans who will be out to continue to advocate tax breaks for the wealthy, which will add $700 billion to the national debt over the next ten years! Also, the aim is to negate any regulation of Wall Street financiers, who caused the Great Recession and have no desire to reform themselves to prevent a future repeat of the same reckless behavior that led to the economic collapse that is the worst we have seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s!

It is clear that the insurance, banking and oil industries, along with many others, have declared war on the Obama Administration and want to see the reforms that have been accomplished in the past 20 months repealed or scaled back!

This is a sustained attack on the American population, most of which is suffering massively, for the aggrandizement of the elite upper class, which now has more of the national income, percentage wise, than at any time in American history! 🙁

If progressives lose the gains that have been made, the country will be going back to a “Gilded Age” mentality just two years after repudiating all of the abuses and shortcomings of the Bush era!

Can the masses of people be that shortsighted, that easily manipulated, that unaware of the damage they would be doing? This is not a time for the average American who voted for change to sit on their hands and be apathetic! The stakes are too high to choose to ignore reality!

Imagine This Scenario: The McCain-Palin Administration After 20 Months! :(

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Let’s just imagine that Senator John McCain had become the President and Governor Sarah Palin had become the Vice President in January 2009!

How would a McCain Presidency have been different than an Obama Presidency?

1. There would have been no bailout of the banking industry, and the financial collapse ensuing would have likely created unemployment and foreclosures twice the rate that they have been!
2. The domestic auto industry would have disappeared completely, and with it, hundreds of thousands of jobs in allied industries, as well as the auto workers!
3. There would have been no economic stimulus, and America would be in Great Depression Number Two, rather than a severe recession!
4. Health care reform would have not occurred, and health care rates would be much worse than they are, and millions more Americans would be denied health care, because of loss of jobs and homes!
5. The Great Depression Number Two would have created more instability in the world economy than this recession has caused!
6. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, police officers, fire fighters, librarians, and other local and state workers would have been dismissed, creating a breakdown of state and local governments on a scale unimaginable!
7. When the BP Oil Spill occurred, the McCain Administration would not have pushed BP to do anything to provide aid to the victims or pay for the cleanup!
8. There would have been no financial reform legislation, no credit card legislation, no student loan legislation, no action on the environment, no movement on gay rights in any form, a sharper crackdown on illegal immigration, and a continuation of tax cuts to the wealthy despite its tremendous burden on the national debt!
9. McCain would have chosen two strong conservatives to the Supreme Court!
10. A lot of Bush II appointees would have ended up working for McCain, and it is likely that former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, one of the major architects of the home mortgage crisis, would have been Secretary of the Treasury!
11. It is likely that neoconservatives who brought us into Iraq would be in power, and the war in Iraq would be further escalated, at a cost of American lives and treasure!
12. The war in Afghanistan would be further escalated beyond what President Obama has promoted!
13. It is likely that McCain would have been building up toward a war against Iran, and possibly North Korea, at the same time, again part of the neoconservative influence!
14. America’s relationship with the world would be much more antagonistic, similar to Bush II, and tension with the Muslim world would be far worse! We would be less safe from the threat of terrorism!
15. Finally, Sarah Palin would be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, and no one could sleep at night without worrying about John McCain’s health! 🙁

It is certain, upon further reflection, that one could come up with other ideas as to how McCain would have influenced the history of the past 20 months, but the list above is more than enough to say to any reasonable person: Thank God Barack Obama is President of the United States!

The Wall Street Rally: Will It Affect The Midterm Election?

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The standard viewpoint of late has been that since the economy has not recovered adequately from The Great Recession, the Democrats will suffer massive losses in the midterm elections coming up in November.

But the recent Wall Street rally in September, the best September since 1939, and the improvement in the market in the early days of October, have to make one wonder if that is a sign of economic expansion!

If it is seen as such, then it might just affect the attitude of many Americans who have soured on the Obama Administration!

Psychology is a very important part of politics, and it is well known that people’s memories are short, so the increased economic activity might just turn the tide for the Democrats, and they may lose fewer seats than often expected!

It just makes the waiting for the election results four weeks from tonight even more interesting and significant!

Record Gap Between Rich And Poor In Census Bureau Report–What Should Be Done About It?

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The United States is now witnessing the greatest gap between rich and poor in the history of record keeping since the 1960s!

The top 20 percent of Americans, earning more than $100,000 a year, had nearly 50 percent of all income, compared with 3.4 percent earned by those considered poor, about 14.5 percent. This nation has the greatest difference in this regard of any Western industrialized nation!

Young adults 18-34, who have lesser skills, are being ignored by employers who prefer higher skilled, more motivated older adults. This is a major crisis for the long run, as to how these people are to function in society in the long run! 🙁

The poverty rate for a family of four in 2009 is just below $22,000 a year! Meanwhile, the top five percent earn more than $180,000 a year!

The Great Recession has, of course, worsened these income statistics, and it is hard to imagine any great turnaround at any point in the near future! 🙁

The question is what should be done by government about this horrible gap, which has been exacerbated by the Republican control of Congress from 1994-2006, and the eight years of the Bush II Administration!

If the decision is to do nothing, a conservative viewpoint, how much worse can it become without a violent reaction? One has to wonder! 🙁