World’s Message To Today’s Republican Party

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Lying Polls

Country Appears Headed In the Wrong Direction Polls say……

*The Conference Board said Tuesday that its confidence index climbed to 94.5, the strongest reading since October 2007 before the start of the Great Republican Depression….

*The National Retail Federation said this morning that it expects holiday retail sales to grow 4.1% to $617 billion. That would mark a substantial increase in the rate of growth over both the 3.1% growth seen in 2013 and the 2.9% ten year average.

*Gasoline is averaging $3.01 a gallon nationally—down 8.2 percent from an average $3.28 a year ago, according to AAA figures. Lowest levels in 5 years….(2009)

* Retail sales among private companies with less than $5 million (small businesses)  in annual revenue have seen 4.5 percent growth in annual sales through September of this year. That’s up 5.5 percent from the same period a year ago.

*Today, more Americans have health insurance than ever! before.

* 10 million people who would have previously had to pay full price for any health treatment can now afford an annual checkup, eye glasses, or birth control pills.

*In the (Democratic) states that embraced the ACA’s planned expansion of Medicaid, the government health care program for the poor, the number of uninsured fell by nearly 40%.

*Unemployment hits a six-year low (2008) at 5.9 percent.

*The US economy added 248,000 jobs in September and in an unexpectedly strong report.

* The GDP report was broadly constructive, with the gains broadly based and pointing to positive underlying momentum in the U.S. economy going into the last stretch of 2014.

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Since polls are made up, created, and have little bearing in reality as do real things, jobs, salary, hours worked, balance sheets, no out of pocket medical bills, …. one must assume, as would any person possessing their reasonable facilities, that these polls are were either blatantly lying, or were deceptively created through cherry picking the prospects, in order to create the illusion its authors “wanted” to create……..

If someone tells you the sky is green outside, do you stay in your cubicle and say “oh wow” … or do you take a break and go outside to see …. it’s as blue as it ever was?

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We finally got hard working America back on its feet after the last Republican Congress and Republican president gave us the largest economic Depression since the Great Depression of 1929:  Properly known as “The Republican Depression of 2008”! …..  Are you truly going to put them back in power to do it all over again?

If you don’t vote…. then you just did…  It all comes down to that… If every single one of you votes, then the real results like these will continue “AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE”….

No matter what the “lying” polls say…..

What To Expect From A Republican Senate?

The answer is to look at the House, and see what bills passed there which would then, clear a Republican Senate and find their way to the President’s desk for a veto….

Here broken down by issue, is what has actually passed the House, but was stopped by the Senate…

Women’s Issues:

*A law that would make it a federal crime for an adult to accompany a teen across state lines for an abortion and hold doctors liable for knowing that.

*A law to ban abortion coverage in all state health-care insurance exchanges.

*A law to ban abortions after 20 weeks with an exception only for the life of the mother.

*A law to end the contraception benefit in the ACA.

These will need to be stopped by the veto pen of Obama. The real danger is if they get slipped into necessary pieces of legislation, funding bills, so he has to bear the burden and blame of shutting down government or letting them pass.

Paul Ryan’s Budget

*Protect tax breaks for the wealthiest.

*Austerity put in place to hold back growth.  Non-defense discretionary spending would fall by $783 billion.

*The Ryan Budget would cut nearly $2.8 trillion from the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies and Medicaid.

*The Ryan Budget cuts all Food stamps, all Earned Income Tax Credit, all unemployment insurance, and all retirement funding for federal workers up to $1 trillion.

*Reducing Pell grants, food stamps, money for renewable energy.

*Target the EPA.

*Federal subsidies for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting can no longer be justified.

*Allow for further drilling access in Alaska, the Outer Continental Shelf, the Gulf of Mexico,  and the Inter-mountain West National Parks.

*Keystone Pipeline

*Go after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gutting Consumer protections by giving business more control, or taking it out from under the Federal Reserve Bank, which could reduce its authority.

Immigration

*An immigration reform  with no path to citizenship, sweetened so that Obama would have a very hard time vetoing: DREAMers, border security, STEM, and temporary legal status.

*Plenty of ways to try to force Obama to accept GOP priorities, especially on immigration matters, or issue a veto that would be difficult for some red-state Democrats to defend.

ACA

*Repeal is unlikely now for political reasons… They would nip and tuck. Starve the ACA by budgetary means. What happens if Congress doesn’t pass the health budget the president requests.

*Doing away with the medical device tax and cutting expenditures required to properly implement ACA and in generally making things nasty for the administration.

Supreme Court

*GOP give a nominee a hearing but sit on the vote, leaving the Supreme Court with only eight members until we see who wins the presidency.

Hillary Clinton

*The Republican Senate will try to keep the Benghazi attack in the headlines until the day Hillary Clinton gives her acceptance speech, and beyond.

*With 2016 coming? The best thing for them to do: (in political terms, that is, albeit not for the country)—is dig in, and drag down Obama’s poll numbers. If you are running to succeed a two-term incumbent from your own party, you are in some sense running for his third term. Gutting Obama hurts Hillary’s chances.

Irony

Ironically more legislation will pass both Houses if Republicans do take the Senate.  If a piece of  legislation clears the House, it will likewise clear the Senate to then land on the desk of the President.  Question is:  is that type of legislation what you really want passed?

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As long a the president has his veto and the Congress cannot override it, the big changes like the ACA already embedded into todays society by the Obama administration cannot be rescinded.   But, considerable bites can be taken out of them.  The next two years will be all about reversing the growth and development achieved over the past 6.

This is what is predicted to pass.. Of course those predictions are being made based off of 2010’s voting results…  (Looking at who voted in 2010 and predicting who will win based on those “probable” voters)…  This is why all the polls are showing the Republicans taking over the Senate….

But this all changes if and only if every single Democrat does go out and vote as they did both times in 2012 and 2008…. if they vote Democratic…..This election is all about getting them off their ass… If every Democrat is motivated to get off their ass, America continues it’s great economic  track record and even continues shuffling forward a little faster…

If they don’t, then we indeed have the road to hell ahead of us…  Conservatives will be grateful, of course, if you stay home… However, your children and grandchildren when they grow up and find out what you you could have prevented and didn’t do, won’t.

 

 

 

 

Until Death Do We Part….

Exclusive:  I accidentally clicked on a link and got sent down this path… It is unlikely you know anything about it.  You may remember that at sometime last year, in excavating for a parking garage some bodies were found in Britain.   Being a mass grave, the original contention was the corpses came from the time of the Black Plague...

Believe it or not, those bodies were exhumed, and in the tissue we found the organism responsible.   We ran its genetics.  The gene code casts serious doubts upon the rat /flee stories we’ve always been told.  And with what we know about disease today, it could not have spread as rapidly as it did, had it not been airborne…. it’s deadliness has been unsurpassed in recorded time.  Its kill rate was as high as 6 out of 10.  … it took Europe 150 more years to catch up again to where it had been when the Black Death arrived….

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Perhaps if health is a concern of yours  you may remember the Madagascar outbreak just at the end of 2013?… 60 people died of what they called the Bubonic Plague… It was.  There is almost a perfect match between the DNA of the Black Plague organism exhumed, and those found in Madagascar….

Today another plague with a different organism is brewing in Africa.  This one is more fearful than the Bubonic plague… The bubonic plague can be cured with antibiotics… For the E.bola outbreak there is not cure known to man…  If you breathe it, you die… Today, it was announced that the outbreak is out of control.  Beyond all hope of containment…  Today, if it were to spread as fast as the Black Plague did person to person, in days, embedded deep within alive, alert healthy people, it would start arriving upon our shores…. Am even greater fear is that someone brings it here on purpose to punish us, and scatters it through New York and Washington’s subways…

So, there is a good chance that this year, we could experience a pestilence that wipes out mankind.  We’ve had these scares before. And stories told afterward are that we came close to having a full epidemic, but were lucky in catching the carriers as we did….

So this of course is the year 2014…. The Black Plague begin to seriously infect Europe in 1348….. IF you don’t take this threat seriously, then do the math and figure out the span of time transpiring between the two….

 

 

Business Tycoon Breaks Down Jobs Report

The tycoon wishes to remain anonymous because he is one of the most solid Republican monetary supporters.

But when asked how he reads this chart, here is his compelling answers….

“Aside from the obvious, that we have had 39 months of continuous private sector job growth, something not seen since the Clinton Era, I suppose the biggest question remains as to “why” the glitches. Why are there parts that drop down in the recovery and seem to go backwards?

Here, let’s just go through the time-line. Let’s start at the bottom of the inverted pyramid… The general climb out of the hole was due to TARP money which jump-started construction projects and the big infusions to banks which kept the economy from falling off the cliff into the pit of no return. It culminated with a big push of Census hiring in March of 2010. Most attention was on Obamacare at that time and with everyone’s lack of attention from the president, congress, and corporate, things languished for several months. Also one must remember that the Republicans looked like they would make big gains in 2010 and turn all Obama’s directives around. That would be very bad if it were so, and no one sank any money into investment until the election determined things.

Those who figured Obama would win, (Northeast and California) invested heavily in October only to be mistaken and with the Tea Party rattling their sabers upon their win, no one invested anything at all. We all thought the economy would crash and burn again. Up until the election we fully expected the Bush Tax Cuts to be eradicated, so our goals had been to move our funds over into areas where they would not be taxed, primarily investment into our own companies. As the tax laws became extended, many of us were not in the right zone at the right time to take advantage of the two year grace period that tends to better reward those investing in liquid assets as opposed to longer term job creating ones.

By 2011, in February we realized the Tea Party was nothing but a boil, a cyst, a sham, and things would hold current at a status quo. February, March, and April we made plans to go forward and grow. Then in May, the first debt crises occurred and shocked, we all pulled back. The Tea Party did not vote on its unceremonious raise and emergency measures were begun to be implemented by the Federal Treasury. In June, we rode our previous success fully betting that no one, not even the Tea Party would be foolish enough to destroy America’s credit rating for their own political gain. By July, we knew we were horribly wrong. We pulled back on every investment option we possibly could.

The Grand Design ($4 Trillion Budget Arrangement) never did come about. If it had we would have thrown everything into getting on the ground floor of the next boom. But by August 2011 we were confident enough to begin putting some of our extra money now trickling in over to self-investment and it continued straight through January 2012.

That was when Republicans began their Primary campaign in earnest and the Democrats were silent by having no primary or no opponent to which to reply; all bets were that the Democrats were very vulnerable. In fact, it looked like it could be a clean sweep of both Houses and the Executive. This would mean all new investment was futile. The Fed would raise interest rates according to all these Republicans against soft money, costing banks billions and overall investment would slow to a crawl. This slide lasted until the juxtaposition of the two party conventions back to back, which gave us all a clear idea of who would win. I mean who would you want behind the shoulder advising the policy of the next president:  Bill Clinton or Clint Eastwood? The fruits of our investments through Sept and Oct. paid off through November and December. Although we too had quite a scare after the first debate.

Then came the Sequester. It is hard to remember now that we really thought we were going off a cliff back then. Once settled, January’s hiring was alread done but February received the spike of top money shifting from taxable investments over to job producing non-taxable investments. The stock market jumped  as world money became content that America had finally finished with its infatuation that the top 1% carry the economy as a whole and should be taxed less, jumped back in. Problems in China and Europe made sure we were the world’s safest investment at the time.

Currently it appears that our entire economy has matured in 2013… if anyone looks at the chart, you see that the spike in February almost perfectly cancels out the dips in January and March, and that the average across all 6 months is very consistent, almost the same number.

In fact, we have plateaued. This is where our economy is right now, growing steadily with population growth and nothing more. There is nothing any more that anyone can do to increase private sector hiring.

Nothing will change I figure until the House of Representatives gets enough democrats and government hiring can begin anew.”

“Oh” I said, “so now you are a Democratic supporter?” lol.

“NEVER!” he responded. “However I’ll admit that Republicans are absolutely worthless when it comes to growing economies.”

And there, you have “the rest of the story….”

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Where do you draw the line?   This piece will philosophically roam a little I’m afraid because there is no set answer, just an amorphous mess that defies confinement if that makes sense.  If it doesn’t…. here is hoping it will near the end of this writing…  🙂

If you can’t guess what the image is in the heading, try imagining a horizontal volume control like what is displayed in most car radios these days.  On it we have unlimited choices across the realm of what we can hear and we choose where we want to draw the line….

I was reminded of this by a soon to be famous video about Seattle’s schools standing up to Kafkaesque craziness the wealthy and corporate America are foisting upon education.  The video starts out with a teacher giving this analogy….

It is as if a mechanic’s boss told his mechanic to put on an inferior brake instead of one the customer had requested.  The customer will not take off the wheels to inspect.  The mechanic says those brake shoes have problems, they fail. they could kill. The boss says, that’s just hype.  They work in China all the time.  Put them on…. 

Now look at the scale above…… In a child’s world of right and wrong we would all expect the mechanic to say “that was wrong” and refuse to do it….  So what if he loses his job? A child would say he should still not do what was wrong and cause someone’s death… But how many of you have had to do what the boss wanted because you were in no shape to state otherwise?

That is where the sliding scale begins to come in play….  If the mechanic refuses, and boss comes out and says, “leave right now, You were insubordinate and I just fired you”….  his spouse is going to say…”What, now we have no money.  Why didn’t you just put the damn things on!” His parents are going to say..” Kid, sometimes an adult has to make adult decisions.  It doesn’t matter what right or wrong is; it matters what right or wrong is for you. Sorry, can’t help you”.  His future job interviewer is going to say; “your former boss said he fired you for insubordination and you have a no re-hire attached to your name. Sorry, can’t hire you.”  And your drinking buddies are going to say;  “Oh as soon as you left, he got Jacobson to put those cheap brakes on anyway.  You lost your job for nothing…”  The arbitrator at your unemployment hearing is going to say  “We found the charges of insubordination substantiated; repeal denied.”…. No job. No money. Hungry family.

So standing up for what is right really doesn’t pay in today’s corporate controlled world, now.  Does it?  It is good story, but works lousy in real life.

So on the slider above, where would you fall?  Where would you be?  If you try to act like you would refuse to do wrong, you are probably a liar. If you swear you will always do the right and moral thing, you are naive, and probably also a liar.  If you insist you would stand up to that boss, you are a simpleton who really doesn’t know much about life, and don’t need the job to survive.

So on the slider unit above, if the far left is standing up for what is right and immediately refusing and the far right is willingly follow the bosses direction right away… which would be you?

Probably for the most part you would be somewhere in the middle, you will say so if you are being true to yourself… You would probably argue once, twice, or maybe three times against it, and you might agree in theory, but in work, not follow through with that agreement, or you might just say “ok boss”  and then still install the good brake pads.

But if you did, what about the next time.  What about the discrepancy in inventory? Sooner or later it will catch up to you… And then you’ll be fired.

Or you could decided that you follow orders and if your boss made such an order, all results would have to fall on him and not you, and if anyone was to be liable and get caught up if any harm came out of it,  it would be him; so you would follow his command and install the inferior parts…

If you are trying to figure out a way to win this, to come up with a perfect spot on this horizontal dial whether it is the far right, far left, center, middle right, middle left, sadly there isn’t a right way… For depending on which way you view the problem, both are right….  As you go to the right, you look bad from the left. As you go to the left, you look bad from the right.  If you are in the middle, you look bad to both, just not as bad as the others at the far end of the spectrum…

There is no way to win.

Except to have the boss never ask you to substitute cheap parts instead of ones ordered by the car’s owner….

That is the trick.

Now here is what we are being asked to do.

• Lower our standards of education for all students.
• Eliminate tuition for all veterans returning from Afghanistan.
• 125,000 individuals and families put at risk of becoming homeless
• 100,000 formerly homeless people might be removed from emergency shelters or other housing arrangements
• Defer maintenance and leave highly necessary staff vacancies open.
• Because rents are so high, many of these families may, quite literally, find themselves out on the street.
• Significant cuts, including ones that deliver hot meals to the elderly and another that helps pregnant women.
• Cuts to the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children known as WIC, which provides food and baby formula for at-risk families.  775,000 low-income women and their children might lose access to or be denied that aid because of the mandatory cuts…
• Cuts to programs that aid children with special needs; job-training programs that help unemployed people find a new career; foreclosure prevention services; and programs that help 150,000 veterans every year make the transition into the nonmilitary work force.
• Reduction in jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed..
• Cut 20% of every military person’s pay.

And why are we being asked to do this?   So the financier’s of the Republican Party like the brake business owner, can make more money……

But this time we do have a choice….  We hire and fire the boss…. Should we fire the Republican bosses?  And replace them with those who have still carry American morals,  and not third world ones?

Where do you want your children to see you, when they look at the sliding  moral scale above?

GET OUT OF THE STOCK MARKET RIGHT THIS MINUTE

Everyone who has followed me knows  I’m always right on the market.   I’m not putting up links but you can go back through the archives and verify all you want.

If you have a mutual fund that allows you to switch from stocks to secured investments like Treasury’s, put the order in now. The smart money is starting to pull out now and the stocks will start dropping and keep falling as long as the switching continues….

Here is the reason….

Mitch McConnell…. “It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester is going to go into effect…Read my lips: I’m not interested in an 11th-hour negotiation.”

The most liberal estimate shows that when the sequester goes into effect the GDP will lose  .5% over the course of the year.  This first Quarter will be positive which means the next three quarters will be in negative territory.

The exact same thing occurred in 1937.   It is usually lumped in by history as a continuation of the Great Depression but two quarters of 1936 looked like our two quarters just after the election this time…  As 1937 opened, just as 2013 opened, prospects were rosy that the worst was behind us. Unemployment had dropped from 25% to 14% with manufacturing  output rising to its 1929 levels, and then, …. with budget cutbacks  to reign in spending, very similar to sequestration today, unemployment shot back up to 19%…. If the same trend holds, our unemployment should rise to 9% again before it stabilizes and then fall slowly, ever so slowly, back to 7% it is today, quite possibly as late as 2016.

Manufacturing then cut back 37% returning work output to 1934 levels.

Finally on April 2,  1938  Roosevelt sent a new large-scale spending program to Congress, and received $3.75 billion which was split among PWA, WPA, and various relief agencies.   Other appropriations raised the total to $5 billion in the spring of 1938, after which the economy recovered.

Unemployment never recovered its 1936 level until the US went into WWII….

The Stock Market which had climbed back to its 1929 high as of  February of 1937,  lost 50% of its value by February 1938…..

Put bluntly, with sequestration, there is zero chance stocks will rise, and a 99% chance they will fall.  Doesn’t it make sense to sell out now, and put that money into the safe keeping of Treasury Bonds?

The Republicans seem jubilent they are causing it this collapse.  I guess afterwards there will be no question in any reporters or any American’s mind, that Democrats and  Keynes were always right, and Republicans and Milton Friedman were always dead wrong.

If you don’t do what I said,  and get out now,  don’t come crying to me… You were warned!

Still Confused By Fiscal Cliff? Now Easily Explained in 6:51 Minutes

Courtesy of the Treasury Blog.

Wisdom Of Our Founding Fathers….

That is probably the biggest take-away historians will keep when they use today’s fiscal crises in future civic’s lessons across this country, precisely in order to teach students just how well put together this nation’s govermnent is…..

I have long blamed the filibustering Senate for intransigence.  Whenever we have an emergency, the House passes legislation quickly, and the Senate takes it’s time.  Things just   s  l  o  w   down in the Senate.

I have also blamed that in part upon the old age of Senators, and the cliques that evolve from spending 20 to 30 years together…  Senators are more worried about upsetting the feelings of Joe So-and-So instead of quickly passing the House’s legislation.  Legislation also gets tabled as a favor to Ms. La-La-La, for a favor she extended 15 odd years ago…

But it is precisely these negatives that allowed the Senate to take up the fiscal cliff legislation that was all-but-dead on arrival in the House….

John Boehner, was forced to give up his lead and capitulate, when his caucus voted down giving even billionaires a tax increase.  His caucus had too many Tea Partiers, who were still green behind their ears, and put their own personal principals, … over top the rest of the financial world’s welfare, including the USA….

John couldn’t control his caucus.  Why was that?  Because the founding fathers wanted the House to be reelected every 2 years.  The idea was that these people who were invested with the responsibility of spending the “people’s” money,  needed to be directly responsible to those back home, who’s money they were spending!  As a result, the Tea Party contingent, whose home-spun philosophy plays well on country porches, has no idea of how things work.  We don’t let two year olds drive cars for a reason.

But,…. who did solve the crises and bring both sides into agreement?

The top two members of the Senate, … The Vice President and  Mitch McConnell, a Louisville Cardnals fan.

For both, a deal was necessary and they crafted one that would sell.  It definitely sold the Senate… 89 to 8….  It sold the problem House of Boehner as well:  257-167 including….. with more Democrats voting for it… 172  than Republicans voted against it… 167.

85 House Republicans voted in support of this McConnell-Biden adaptation, keeping us from going over the cliff before the markets opened up in Asia…. (which at time of print are all up between .6% and 2.2%)..

Through a personal relationship based on a long history of dealing with each other in a non adversarial fashion, a deal was struck.  We were clued in two weeks ago that the $400,000 level would be the floor.  No surprise there.

But, now it is clear that Social Security will no longer be on the chopping block in two months.  Medicare will no longer be on the chopping block in two months.  Unemployment compensation (for those dismissed by their corporate employers for working too many hours under Obamacare), now will still dribble some cash to get by.  The Earned Income Credit, the best part of the year for anyone earning less than $30,000, is no longer on the chopping block!

For this, the increases in additional taxes on income, estates, and investments, were softened a bit.  Even though there will now be less movement of cash from the private sector to the Treasury than occurred under the boom years under Clinton, but… as long as the economy takes off, we can worry about that later.

For that, is why this bill was passed.   Signs are encouraging that the economy is getting better, now that the world KNOWS no Republican (whether he really wanted to be president or not) will run the country.

To nix that up, and again, hurt those who were most hurt before, is unconscionable.

For most Americans, working and living and dying in our towns, this is what is important.  It never could have happened under the dynamics of the House of Representatives.  Only in the Senate, could such an agreement even be possible….

Only there buried within the term of 6 years, is enough distance available to exercise good judgment on what is necessarily right for this country, then have time to deal and fix the political repercussions back home… Only there is an opponent also a dear friend, one you take seriously and trust, causing you to give up a little more on both sides.

Only there.  Once again, we see the great wisdom possessed in those we call The Founding Fathers…. Who could have known?

American Press Lies; Rest Of World Says It Like It Is

Here is the editorial from the Guardian, a UK paper…   The Republicans try to shunt its criticism by saying it is bias.  Actually, it is just the truth they don’t want to hear….

Before you go further, ask yourself, …. how many times have you heard on American television or in American editorials, that it is “BOTH”  parties’ fault?   Too many to remember?

Here is what the Guardian says….

 

And virtually this entire situation is the result of Republican intransigence. If you’ve come looking for false equivalence or a pox on both houses-style argument, you’ve come to the wrong place. This one is all on the GOP. They’ve created this crisis; the perpetuated it and then refused to resolve it until the country had basically gone over the fiscal cliff they manufactured.

 

Since Republicans won the House of Representatives in 2010, the country has staggered from one pointless fiscal showdown after another. In every case, Congress and the president have repeatedly kicked the can down the road rather than pass legislation that either made serious efforts to right the country’s fiscal imbalances, or would stimulate economic growth.   Meanwhile, the US economy continues to underperform; unemployment remains frustratingly high; climate change is worsening; the immigration system is a mess; the nation’s infrastructure is still falling apart … and I could go on. In fact, this Congress is the least productive since the 1940s.

There you have it:  straight from the horse’s mouth… As those of us on this side of the pond who don’t have editors changing the truth in what we write, we say… Hear! Hear!