Friday, September 30, 2011

China Venture Is Good for GE but Is It Good for U.S.? - WSJ.com

China Venture Is Good for GE but Is It Good for U.S.? - WSJ.com

As awkward as it is for me to reference anything coming from the Wall Street Journal, this article is noteworthy.

Beggar thy neighbor is not a responsible international trade/foreign relations policy for the world's second largest economy.

If China is going to continue to operate in the world economy using an aggressive, self-serving national industrial policy that disadvantages the rest of the world -- not to mention currency manipulation that pegs the yuan/renmimbi to the dollar at undervalued levels that advantage their exports & disadvantage their imports, which only exacerbates our current account trade deficits [which, in turn, reduces US GDP] -- then:

Why do we grant them most favored nation trading status?
Why aren't they sanctioned by the WTO, the complaints addressed, and redress made for the unfair imbalances?
Why are they even allowed into the WTO?
Should we adopt our own self-serving national industrial policy?

I need to investigate & ponder further...

But I already know what my gut is telling me.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Jesse's Café Américain: Elizabeth Warren On the US Deficit Problem and Fair Taxation

Jesse's Café Américain: Elizabeth Warren On the US Deficit Problem and Fai...:

We need more Elizabeth Warren's to run for Congress, the Senate & the White House.



Why don't we hear talk like this from OUR delegation here in Maine?

We won't get it from Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Olympia thinks Jim DeMint is somebody we should listen in re: spending, taxation and limited government.  She (and Jim) believes the federal government's budget should be balanced by a Constitutional amendment.  Particularly if the balancing has to occur annually (or anything less than complete boom-to-bust cycle), she is essentially saying that the government should not be able to use fiscal policy as a tool to counteract cyclical excesses or deficiencies. 

Not only is this cruelly irresponsible (and contrary to what the Constitution expressly requires -- what, a government Of/For/By the People is NOT supposed to respond to their petitions for economic justice, opportunity and salvation from abject poverty?)  but it is stupid macroeconomics. 

Austerity is NOT Prosperity (except maybe in Orwellian NewSpeak? Shades of Arbeit Macht Frei!), and preventing the federal government from being able to deficit spend to counteract severe economic downturns is national suicide. 

The Liquidationists return. 

The same ideological complaint is voiced by Rick Perry when he called Ben Bernanke treasonous:  Government should not be able to use monetary policy to stimulate a moribund, high unemployment economy... notwithstanding Congress' mandate to the Fed to achieve full employment. 

So much for moderation.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

My All-Time Favorite Anti-Republicon Rant

Joanne98 Thu Sep-03-09 04:55 PM
Original message
Dear Republicans FUCK YOU!


Dear Republicans,

Fuck you. No, I'm not joking. I'm sick of this bullshit.

I'm sick of the way you've corrupted the public discourse. The way you've made it acceptable to hurl any insult you like at public officials. The way you blame us for the current atmosphere of hatred by accusing us of starting it with hating Bush. Like Bush didn't come on the heels of eight years of your tireless efforts to destroy Clinton by any means necessary, like Bush didn't give us good reason to complain. A couple of posters on a website compared Bush to Hitler and you've used it as free license to compare Obama to Hitler 24/7 and I'm sick of your hypocrisy, where it's acceptable to say shit about Obama that you would have had an apoplectic fit (and did) if anything remotely similar had been said about your guys. Keith Olbermann calls Cheney a fascist when he was actually using fascist tactics and you think that gives you the freedom to call Obama a fascist, socialist, Marxist constantly for no reason at all. Fuck you and your bullshit false equivalency.

I'm sick of the way you've made the populace stupid. Around a fifth of your populace thinks the sun orbits the earth, over half think evolution never happened. Your populace actually believe the media has a liberal bias. Not because it has, you have the most conservative media in the free world, but because you've shouted it so loud and so often that you've brainwashed the public into believing it, like the battered wife who parrots her husband's insults. You've got a whole segment of the populace shouting about socialism and fascism and none of them know what the fucking words mean. You've convinced them that fascism is a left-wing thing. You've got them so turned around that some of them actually believe global warming isn't happening. Fuck you.

I'm sick of the way you try to destroy the whole concept of government. You've tricked the people into believing that government can't do anything right, always being careful to exclude the army because you love your bullets and bombs but you've so destroyed the public's ability to reason that they don't even think of interstate highways, the space program, the national parks program, etc. Government is always great when it's doing what you tell it and inevitably corrupt when it isn't. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your rewriting of history. You've bleated so loud and long that Reagan was a great president, that the New Deal didn't work, that cutting taxes increases revenues, that you actually have the people believing this bullshit. And these are the same people who will go on to become teachers and fill their student's heads with this self-same bullshit. Reagan was a mediocre president at best who had the good fortune to be in power when the USSR collapsed under it's own weight and you bastards have turned him into the Second Coming. You've rewritten history so that everything foul and hateful and wrong can be attributed to a Democrat while everything worthwhile is a Republican's glory. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your dragging the center ever further to the right. How many whackjob fringe ideas have you dragged into the mainstream? The aforementioned idea that tax cuts increase revenues, the Laffer Curve, the idea that Welfare harms the poor, the idea that there's rampant fraud in Welfare, the idea that whatever is good for corporations is good for the country. And you push these ideas through your corporate media and you do it so long and loud that they become part of the accepted political landscape and because it is easier to tell a lie than to debunk one, we never get away from this rancid shit. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your casual criminality. Teddy Kennedy, a man who's boots you were not worthy to lick, was just buried and all I've heard from my rightist friends for days is Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick. Your fucking golden boy raped the Constitution, mainly because he wanted to; tortured random people (and waterboarding is torture, fuck you too) essentially because he wanted to; spent like a drunken sailor, essentially because he wanted to; invaded a sovereign nation, essentially for the loot and destroyed people's lives, essentially for the evilulz and you bastards are obsessed with a fucking accident a Democrat had decades ago? You don't go on about Laura Bush killing some guy decades ago. Fuck you.

I'm sick of you praising pure evil. You're letting Dick Cheney be the standard-bearer for Republicanism. Dick Cheney, a man so nakedly evil that even his friends call him "Darth"; a man so callous that Lex Luthor would recoil in terror; a man who probably has dismembered hitchhikers in those man-sized safes and kills plants by his mere proximity. Fuck you.

I'm sick of your attempts to tilt the playing field permanently in your favor. Democrats filibustered a few of Bush's most hateful judicial picks and you pricks started screaming about doing away with the filibuster but now you're in the minority, you're filibustering absolutely everything you can and whining when you don't get the chance. You ignored everything the Democrats had to say when you had power and now that you don't, you scream that everyone must be bipartisan. You don't budge a fucking inch on anything but you insist that everyone must compromise to meet you. That's your idea of politics: Don't move an inch, force the other guy to come to the right to meet you and call the result a "compromise". Fuck you.

I'm sick of your corporatism. You dress it up in false populism but anyone with half a brain can see that you're the brought and paid for subsidiary of big business. You keep pushing tax cuts as the answer for absolutely everything, you keep sabotaging every attempt to control the excesses of big business. You genuinely think the world would be a better place if it was a combination of Bill Gibson's dystopian vision of a corporate dominated world and Ayn Rand's bullshit Objectivism, yet another entry in mankind's endless attempts to find a moral justification for naked greed. You've taken the clinically insane spewings of a woman literally to the right of Hitler (pardon my Godwins) and the 1984-like vision of a dystopian author and convinced yourselves that would be a good place to live. Big business is the enemy of the people, always has been. The ideal for the corporate class is to have a small pool of people rich enough to buy their fucking crap and a much larger pool of people so poor and with so few options that they can be used and abused at the corporation's whim. A corporation's objective is not to look after you, it is to make ever-larger profits by any means necessary. You bastards want to reinstate fucking slavery to the corporate class and you've made the public so fucking stupid that they actually swallow the bullshit you're serving up, they actually want to enslave themselves to the corporations that abuse them at every turn. They actually care more about the corporations right to make obscene profits than they care about their child's right to live on a habitable planet. Fuck you.

Fuck you, you scumridden shitehawks, you make me sick. Just fuck off and die.