See Prometheus 6 and the BooMan.
See also E.J. Dionne, “Another Angry Black Preacher” and “The Street on Welfare.”
Paul Krugman explains why we’re re-making the mistakes of 1929.
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
See Prometheus 6 and the BooMan.
See also E.J. Dionne, “Another Angry Black Preacher” and “The Street on Welfare.”
Paul Krugman explains why we’re re-making the mistakes of 1929.
So McCain was out of town (warming up relations with the Sunni and Shiite) while all this unpleasant “Race Discussion” between HRC and BHO. Boy he missed some fun didn’t he? I bet he had nothing to do with any of it. Except a real nasty little race baiter his staffer posted on you tube. I won’t bother to link, but FOX news did, on the front page website willy, and I believe still are. It’s a real hateful number. I am starting to think that maybe FOX may try to influence the outcome of this election. And as the right wing chandeliers that they are wouldn’t you think they would bet on BHO? They sell all their news to mostly old conservative people. Why can’t the old conservative nominee beat the young black guy? The thing is FOX news and bu$hco don’t really care if either HRC or McCain win. They have cut deals with both. Deals that will stop the truth about: why, how, when, and how much, bu$hco pissed away, how many laws were broke in the last eight years, and maybe the eight before that? I don’t think BHO made that deal, not yet anyway. McCain and HRC are not really afraid of Obama, they are afraid of the past. 4+8+8= 20 years and we aint even counting Reagan!~uNcledad.
Check out this way cool band, they write one song a week.!
“I am starting to think that maybe FOX may try to influence the outcome of this election.”
Yeah, ya think?
Hillary cares about nothing, what happened to Hillary-care?
Not only have we forgotten the reason for the great depression, we have also forgotten why the south lost the civil war. They had the best generals and the troops were about the same, but they had NO manufacturing plants in the south. They couldn’t make most of the things needed to wage a war.It was an agricultural society and all the manufacturing was in the north. The south had the cotton but the mills were in the north. They couldn’t even make uniforms.
So when it came down to it they lost because they could not supply the war effort or their own familys with manufactured goods.
During WWII Rosevelt forced many manufacturers of common things (like toasters) to change to making supplies for the army.
Even then it was touch and go if we had enough manufacturing places to do the work.
If you go into a store today to buy something. Just about anything, it is made in China. We have exported so many manufacturing jobs overseas that we hardly make anything here anymore.
What if we have another world war? And what if China is NOT our ally? Are we going to be able to import all our needs? OF COURSE NOT! We won’t have enough of anything because we need to import so much. We rationed meat, sugar , GASOLINE, rubber (car tires), coffee. And that was when we had way more manufacturing in the USA.
History, if you don’t remember it you are doomed to repeat it.
3 more GI’s killed in Iraq… I’m glad they are getting killed in small increments so as not to hurt McCain’s presidential aspirations. McCain says, as long as American soldiers are killed piecemeal it won’t jeopardize his campaign platform of continuing Bush’s policy in Iraq.
The American people can handle blowing 12 billion dollars a month in Iraq, but become uncomfortable with marching freedom when the casualty figures exceed a 100 dead GI’s a month. Do we really weep and mourn?
I guess that 4000 dead would be “worth it”, if I knew exactly what “it” is that dying for gives worth.
As I watch the annual ritual of March Madness, I wonder why a desparate team, loosing in the final quarter, does not call time out and let the referee and the other team know that it’s essential that they all get together to change the rules of the game. Sadly, and in a show of poor sporsmanship, that’s exactly what HRC is demending. I am from Florida; I understood what happened here and why before I voted.
There’s a lot of reasons why a revote is a bad idea, including the cost and the logistics, and the possibility of fraud. But mostly, when the rules are clear and understood by both teams when you step onto the floor, it’s legalistic trickery and bad manners to throw a tantrum and demand a new rules when you are losing the game under the rules you all agreed to before the game began.
I can understand the disappointment HRC must feel; she and Mike Huckabee should probably team up (who would be on the top of the ticket?) and run as the sore loser party who won’t give up.
It’s time for Hillary’s corner to throw in the towel. She’s just damaging the Democrats chances of winning the White House. She’s growing more distasteful as a candidate on a daily basis to the point where she’s becoming Libermanesque with her divine right of kings aura.
Not to mention her incessant embellishments… Now she’s the Baryshnikov of the Sarajevo shuffle.
There are many similarities between today and the 1920’s. They also had a housing bubble (8 billion in mortgages in 1921 tripled by 1929 to 27 billion), a stock bubble which is common knowledge, and even a consumer credit bubble where 10% of consumers spending was on durable goods, much of it paid on an installment plan through finance companies.
The key difference between 1929 and today, is that the working class was relatively healthy then, taxes were low (1.5% then vs 10-25% in the lower brackets today, 25% then vs 35% now for upper brackets today), and government finances and manufacturing were strong. We were a creditor nation and not a debtor nation. Our government debt that accrued during the war dropped from 24 billion early in the 20’s to 16 billion in 1930 (the bankers frowned at this). We were on the gold standard. Inflation was low. Between 1922 and 1928 prices rose 1%. Not per year, 1% over 6 years!.
In 1933 FDR went off the gold standard, the government called in all the gold and made it a crime not to exchange it for dollars. After they turned in the gold, FDR increased the value of gold by 40%, by devaluing the dollar 40% (and we have a devalued dollar today). In addition, it allowed the Fed to create unlimited money since it was not constrained by a gold standard. This allowed FDR to spend whatever money he needed for the New Deal by borrowing it from the Fed (thats how money is created, with debt). He could have just issued his own debt free money and not paid interest, but then he would have ended up like Lincoln.
Back to today. Sir Bubbles creates a stock bubble, pops it in 2000 by raising interest rates at a time when the government has finally balanced the budget (well, almost, they were still stealing from the SS trust funds cookie jar to the tune of 200 billion per year). History repeats. You do not balance budgets or pay down the debt and not be punished.
But here is where history diverges a bit from the 1929-1932 period after the crash. The Fed immediately drops interest rates after the dot.com crash, 9/11 gives us a GWOT and Iraq, and allows for unrestrained government spending (debt which creates money) on defense and security, tax cuts are provided for the rich that also helps create money with increasing government debt, a big bonus to Big Pharma with Medicare Part D that increases debt, and all kinds of money is around to loan out, and since the consumers real wages are being reduced, they have much demand for loans, and our currency was devalued. Much of what was done in 1933 was done in 2001 after the 2000 crash.
If they kept money tight like in 1929-1932, we would have had a Great Depression 7 years ago instead of what has probably been a mild depression for 7 years masked by false economic indicators, and broken up by a 2 year phony recovery created from the tax cuts and war spending. The so called jobless recovery was a hoax. Most new jobs created in this period involved handling bed pans and serving fries, or selling sub-primes.
So Bush kind of did a New New Deal starting in 2001, but the working class was not in on the deal, and it failed since the money created stayed in the hands of the rich and did nothing for the real economy, unlike FDR’s New Deal which was being partially sabatoged by the bankers causing a recession in 1937 when thye raised interest rates and tightened credit over fears of inflation.
A Great Depression may follow, or maybe we will skip that and go directly to War. It might start with Iran, but it will not be limited to Iran. Russia (over Kosovo), and Venezuela (over Columbia-Ecuador dispute), and maybe China (over Russia/Iran). Might even be nuclear.
Abigail and PFT — may I say you both have a weirdly selective and distorted understanding of history. I don’t disagree with everything you say, but some of it is bizarre.
One statement in particular that needs addressing is the notion that the middle class of 1929 was relatively healthy. It was not, or at least, it wasn’t in many parts of the country. Among other indicators, sales of new autos and household consumer goods stagnated after 1926, almost three whole years before the stock market crash. The economy was in deep trouble in Calvin Coolidge’s last term, but politicians and the wealthy weren’t being affected — yet — so they persuaded themselves everything was just fine.
Most of the roots of the Depression are to be found in the Coolidge Administration. I know the worst of it went on during Hoover’s watch, but by the time Hoover became President there was little he could have done to head it off. Of course, he was ineffectual in dealing with it, passing most of the mess on to FDR.
I know you want to pin all sorts of economic problems on Roosevelt, probably because you’ve been brainwashed to want to pin it on Roosevelt, but you have a chronology problem, since Roosevelt didn’t become President until 1933, after the Depression had hid bottom.
We are headed for trouble not because our policies are too much like Roosevelt’s but because our policies are too much like Coolidge’s and Hoover’s. See a couple of my old posts, “Shameless Hustles and Tax Cuts” and “Awful Aughts.”