What I worry about is not that we are at the precipice of another Great Depression, ala 1927. What I worry about is that we are at the precipice of another Great Depression, ala 1873.

The "Long Depression" (which is what we call it; the people who lived through it called it "The Great Depression") had one of the longest recessions on the books. That recession, depending on the economist, lasted from 5 to 10 years. But what's scary is that it left the economy on perilous and shaky ground. The governments at the time, beholden to corporate and wealthy power, did nothing to correct the deep systemic problems that created The Panic of 1973, and because of that, our economy (and the world economy) roiled through endless severe recessions until The Great Depression.

Right now we're at a crossroads. Either we initiate a lot of fundamental, systemic and severe reforms on our free market economy, or we go back to the way things have been for the last thirty years (the laissez-faire, market is good, regulations are bad model). The problem is that before The Great Depression, our economy would experience regular and deep crashes. In that environment, 401ks are useless, and investing is only open to the rich (mutual funds become too risky for middle class). Before The Great Depression, there was a market crash (not just a recession, but a full out crash) every 5 to 20 years, like clockwork.

So our choice now is simple: either we go along with the laissez-faire crowd, and prepare for more crashes in our lifetime. Or we change shit so that he gains aren't as high, but the risks are also not as high.

A still photo from the William K. Black interview on Bill Moyers Journal

I agree with all of his details and almost all of his facts, but as usual, I disagree with the larger synopsis that our current mess is due to fraud. I disagree that Geitner and co. are lying. At worst, they're lying to themselves, or considering the political ramifications of their actions. Likewise, the banks did engage in a type of fraud, and our fiscal situation was a giant Ponzi scheme, but the stress needs to be placed on systemic corruption, NOT on individual corruption. The problem with our individualistic viewpoint is that we miss structural problems and systemic corruption. It's NOT a cover-up; but a combination of a lazy press, a lazy public, and deep rooted ideological and structural problems that resulted in the inadvertent fraud and inadvertent Ponzi scheme of our larger economy. Yes, the banks and the government (in deregulating the industry) ARE responsible for the mess, but it's not a problem of individuals, but a problem of systemic ideological pressures, models and structures. Again, this was a structural/ideological problem, not a moral problem.

Other than that, this is a good program to listen to. I like Bill Moyers.

I've been doing nothing but research for the last few months. Diving in endless books, articles, and newspapers from 1913. I love doing it, but it's definitely exhausting, and I haven't been going out. I mean, I have plenty of stories to write about: my friend was in the hospital; I was lightly bit by a dog during a despondent conversation on the waterfront; a few dating shenanigans; a lot of art that I need to post; several friends in town; and general happenings; but mainly I work on the book, listen and read news, and... well, that's about it.

---

But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing because I just had a "HOLY SHIT" moment. I don't watch Jon Stewart, except for clips that are embedded on LiveJournal or various blogs. The man and his writers are smart and funny, but this interview with Jim Cramer, the CNBC financial commentator, is one of the most incisive, honest, and vicious interviews that I've seen.

Jon Stewart kicks Jim Cramer's ass!
( Click here to see Jon Stewart kicking ass... )

Jim Cramer, btw, is one of the financial commentators/entertainers on CNBC, the only financial network, but he's been wrong about pretty much everything. So has CNBC. And it's nice to see Jon Stewart tearing into him.

The press has done a horrible job covering this mess. TV news, as usual, is fucking awful, and didn't cover anything until after September, 2008, which was long after the shit exploded. TV news continues to be sensationalistic and completely misinformed. From what I've seen, if you get your financial news from TV, then you might know LESS than someone who doesn't follow news at all. But the newspapers weren't much better. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal buried the important articles about the lead up to this mess (which started breaking, by the way, in the winter of 2007) in the back of their newspapers, on pages A27 and the like, which is exactly where they buried the counter news that suggested that there were no WMD in Iraq.

Look, this shit is just too important for anyone to run around without the basics of economic knowledge. It effects you. It effects you as much medical science effects you. We should all know enough about economics to know what people are proscribing. Because let's be straight, we're in heart attack mode. It's not the end of the world; the U.S. will emerge intact, but many countries might not, and if this goes on long enough who knows what could happen? War? Let's pay attention people. And thank you, Jon Stewart, for taking on Jim Cramer, and calling him a snake oil salesman.

Thank you.

I'm hearing a lot of talk about the “personal responsibility” of the individual home owners, and about their responsibility in this financial crisis. It's a bullshit talking point and I think it's mainly a way to deflect responsibility from the real culprits of this crisis. Let's break down the truth behind personal responsibility and the current housing mess:

First: the majority of the people who are in trouble did everything right. They're still fucked. Let's call them The Fucked Majority.

Second is the VERY small percentage of people who were getting idiotic loans (like NINA: No Interest, No Assets). A vast chunk were actively pursued and conned, but many were simply ignorant (but were still pursued despite their ability to repay ANY loan). Lets call the second group The Idiotic Minority.

Third is a TINY subgroup of the Idiotic Minority who KNEW they couldn't repay their loans. Let's call them The Wicked Few.

None of those groups created the mess. That's the most important thing to remember. Focusing on them is bullshit because it distracts people from the real perpetrators of this crisis. The real perpetrators were the banks, the mortgage lenders, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, 30 years of government hellbent on deregulation and laissez-faire ideology, and the rating agencies. But primarily to blame are the banks and a government that allowed them to do whatever they wanted.

( A LOT more... )

Quick question for any economist: The Obama team was reportedly looking at issuing debit cards with a expiration date. Supposedly, they rejected the idea because the infrastructure isn't in place. Since the money couldn't be saved, that would seem to perfectly fit Keynes' solutions. It seems like a great idea. One problem I imagine is that it would have no lasting effect on our country, unlike spending on infrastructure or creating jobs, but it could kick the economy into gear. Right?

What economic problems or theoretical downsides am I missing?

I'm in love with Planet Money, the economic blog, which is wonderfully balanced and refreshingly honest. There's a lot of economic lies out there right now, and a lot of baseless opinions. Now is the time to educate ourselves to figure out what is going on and why, and Planet Money isn't a bad place to start.

CNBC had two of the most prescient economists of our time on their show; two economists, Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb, who got everything right about our current economic situation and problems, and the "newscasters," instead of asking them for their opinions on the state of the economy, traded stupid barbs and asked them for investment advice. God damn. It's like asking Einstein how to fix your flashlight, or asking Stephen Hawking how fast his wheelchair can go. I'm mean... really? Really? That's the best you can do?

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846

Paul Krugman compared the "newscasters" performance to this:

( One of the funnier things ever... )

If you want to hear the Bank of America CEO talk about his bank, then check out the following link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/business/08split.html
(The video is down in the middle of the page.)

He claims that BOA won't take anymore government money. I call bullshit, but we'll wait and see. He claims that the money that his main employees received was justified and STILL is justified. He claims that the $500,000 cap on total wages will make him lose some of his best people to other banks. To that, I say, "Fuck you." As Jon Stewart's team said, "You don't have 'The Best People.'" Your people suck, and they don't deserve ANY money. If they can find a job that will pay them more in this economy, then more power to them.

Also, the interviewer hammers him about Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch (the investment bank that went under in 2008).In the middle of the interview, during what would normally be a commercial break, the interviewer talks to other workers; it's pretty cool.

The interviewer asks some heavy questions: She asks him about nationalization, which he swears is unnecessary (no surprise there, Jaime Dimon of JPMorgan Chase says the same thing). However, he agrees that excessive compensation might have something to do with our current situation. Great interview for those who are interested in economics.

This whole "bad bank" plan of Obama's awful financial team is an exceptionally bad idea.

[We already] have an existing mechanism for a bad bank -- it is called the FDIC. If a bank makes too many bad bets and becomes insolvent, the FDIC comes in. The insured depositors get paid off, or transferred to a healthy bank. The branches and other physical assets get sold to other banks. The shareholders of the insolvent bank are wiped out and the uninsured depositors and other creditors take a haircut.

If that is the plan, I have no problem with it. If, given the scale of the problem, some new entity (let's call it "RTC2") needs to be set up to hold these assets until they either run off or can be sold back to the private sector, so be it.

(from Zacks Investment Research)

The "bad bank" is the same failed plan that Henry Paulson proposed (it was his "Plan A"). The same plan that wildly failed.

Look, this is a case where the Republicans are correct (as well as many left-wing economists). "Bad banks" are a truly bad idea.

The basics are this: our big banks, esp. Bank of America and Citigroup are insolvent. That is, they are broke. Only JPMorgan is doing ok, but it is now "too big to fail," which means it is ipso facto financially guaranteed by you and me, the American tax payer, without having any obligation to be careful in their risk taking.

When a bank fails, the FDIC should take over. We essentially liquidate the bank and sell it off to stronger banks. In this case, since all the banks are weak, we are supposed to nationalize the bank and sell it as soon as we can.

The lesson learned from Japan in the 1990s, or Sweden, or Argentina, or countless other times, is that keeping a bank alive as a zombie, with no real assets is a stupid thing to do. It will completely prolong the pain and make things worse.

What's happening here is a similar failure of ideology that brought us into this mess. Both the Republicans and the Democrats can't stand the idea of nationalization, and they'd rather suck money from tax-payers and hope that the problem will go away. They know it won't, but they'd rather try that, just one last time, before they actually nationalize the banks and wipe out the rich people behind them,

( more details... )

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/opinion/05krugman.html

Paul Krugman talks about the looming New Great Depression and what we need to do to stop it from spreading. He points out that this crisis disproves Milton Friedman's monetarist ideas about the Great Depression - Friedman's ideas about stopping a depression are completely failing, and the unfashionable Keynsians look to be totally right. And for those of you who dislike Krugman, let me point out that the man has been right about everything that has been important in the last 10 years. His track record is better than any other op-ed columnist's I've heard of. He was right about the dot com bubble, the lack of WMDs in Iraq, the housing bubble, the current precarious state of our economy, everything. His missteps are few and far between, and mainly about getting the timing wrong. He thought the housing bubble would pop earlier then it did, and didn't expect the current melt down to be quite so bad.

BTW, this is part of another thing I plan to do this year: post smaller, quicker entries in this blog.

My old job has been getting a lot of press lately, and none of it good.

In 2004, I was hired by JP Morgan Chase to design a weekly report. A few months later, I went from a graphics guy to a "Market Risk Analyst." It's a long story, but basically I had to learn what everyone did in order to design and program the report. I did a good job and I guess they decided that hiring the designer of the report was a good idea, even though the designer, me, went to art school and didn't have any formal fiscal training. The report, btw, was supposed to be temporary.

Anyway, it took me awhile to understand what the department did, but basically they were a bookie. Market Risk was supposed to set the odds and tell the heads of the bank which groups and individuals were making risky bets. Obviously, all of the risk departments in every bank failed pretty spectacularly.

One of our prime mathematical tools, Value at Risk (VaR), has come under intense scrutiny. It's damn complicated, but basically it averages out the worst losses of the last few years, measures that against historical profits and losses, and gives you the amount of money you can possibly lose in a day - at a 99% accuracy. Now, 99% sounds pretty good, but that still means that 1 out of 100 times you're going to lose. If that 1 out of 100 can destroy your business, then those are really shitty odds.

When I asked my boss about the crappy odds, she laughed. "Yes, that's true," she said, "and we have stress scenarios that are supposed to look at the rare crashes, but they're more art than science."


It's a brave new world. Yet we still aren't doing anything to make the banking system better. There's no additional transparency; the old ratings systems, which failed spectacularly, are still surprisingly in business; and the banks are getting tax payer money without any strings attached - all with the same bad management and same bad business practices.

I've been writing about the shit substructure of the financial world ever since I became a part of it. (Here's a post were I talk about the coming Great Depression, subprime lending, and our shaky monetary structure.)* And I'm not any smarter than anyone else, I just paid attention, and did so without an ideological spin or vested interest. It does us all good to learn about this stuff. Because unless severe changes are forced on the money people, this shit will happen again.

This never should have been allowed to happen. We had all of the tools to stop it, but instead of relying on them, we systematically dismantled them - at exactly the time when we needed them. We collectively worshiped at the altar of the free market and forgot about the importance of transparency and the many, many lessons of market failure.

So why are making the same mistakes?

I haven't been writing about economics because a) by now, everyone knows how bad the situation is, and b) anyone who bothers to read has by now tried to figure out what's going on.


One thing that concerns me is the amount of lies and public myths that are spreading around. Today I received, from two different people, "insider" information that "friends in banking" told them that "they" are going to close down banks today. I already deleted the texts, but they were exactly the same, which leads me to believe that you all have gotten the same thing, or WILL get the same thing today or tomorrow. But it is a lie. It's not true and there's no truth to it. I am a "friend in banking" and I can tell you it's bullshit.

Likewise, my LJ-friend Lin showed me another lie that I see popping up all over the place, including Wikipedia: the lie that the Community Reinvestment Act had anything to do with this crisis. It's a lie. Here's the facts. (A quick and rough overview: the lenders who followed CRA issued LESS subprime loans then everyone else.) It's a lie perpetuated by the far-right libertarian crowd who can't man-up and admit their direct responsibility for this crisis. They recklessly deregulated EVERYTHING for the last thirty years and THAT is what caused this shit storm.

Also, a lie on the left is that there is any sort of conscious will. That is, the lie that some evil cabal of bankers and rich dudes are deliberately doing this. Naomi Klein alludes to this, but is finally changing her tune. She's right to say that periods of crisis are exactly when people in power push the extremes of their ideology, but in this case, the very crisis is caused by the ideology that everyone has believed in for thirty years. More importantly, all of the bankers and regulators (including Congress, Paulson and Bernanke) know this, and although the bankers are still trying to prevents any laws passing that would hurt them in the future, they all know that this crisis could make them disappear and lose everything. They understand that their laissez-faire policies failed completely and are more interested in staying alive then acting as a global Svengali.

Anyway, I think the public is partially to blame for this mess, since they've been placidly cheering laissez-faire deregulation (for some reason that I will never understand). There were plenty of people warning everyone about this, but they were all Cassandras, all pilloried, laughed at, and ignored.


( The rest is mainly text, and isn't really worth reading... )

The Crisis Explained - Really

by rdf

The italicized notes are by me, Troy Swain.

Analogies are never perfect, but here's one using horse racing. Don't expect a perfect correspondence to the banking situation, but I think it is close enough for government work.

1. Joe goes to the track and bets $2 on a horse.
   
   [This is roughly the loan/mortgage.]


2. Two guys standing nearby get into a discussion and Fred says to Sam, "I'll bet you $5 that Joe wins his bet."
   
   [This is roughly a derivative, and Fred is kind of making a "call" option (a bet that the original bet will win). But it could also be the security created by the investment bank, where the bank collects a pool of loans/mortgages in something like an MBS (Mortgage Backed Security).]


3. Next to them are Bill and Bob. Bill says: "I'll bet you $10 that Fred welshes on his bet if he loses."
   
   [All the rest of these bets are derivatives. This is roughly a swap, like a credit default swap.]


4. Next to them is Sally. Sally says: "For $3 I'll guarantee to Bill that if Bob fails to pay off, I'll make good on the bet."
   
   [This is roughly what AIG specialized in.]


5. Sally then goes to Mary and borrows the $7 needed in case she has to ever pay off and promises to pay back $8. She doesn't expect to every have to pay since she believes Bob will always make good. So she expects to net $2 no matter what happens to Joe.
   
   [All of this is based on computer models, and all of it is 'hedged,' which means you bet a little here and bet a little there, and hopefully the money you win will balance out any money you can potentially lose.]

A quick calculation indicates that there is now 2+5+10+3+7 = $27 riding on the outcome of the horse race, and $25 riding on the original $2 bet.

---

Question: How much has been "invested" in the horse race?

Answer:

( The answer... )

Holy shit. Washington Mutual just disappeared. It's the biggest banking collapse in U.S. history.

So congress just scuttled the bail-out plan. Wait, actually, House Republicans just scuttled the bail-out plan. Republicans, supposedly under Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the chief deputy whip, are circulating an alternative course that would rely on government-backed insurance, not taxpayer-financed purchase of mortgage assets. That's just stupid, and I can't see how it could work. It doesn't deal with any of the problems of the crisis. It doesn't help the banks loan money to each other, which is our worst problem, and it doesn't do shit against the other problems. Just stupid.

By all accounts it's the House Republicans who are behind this. One of their very stupid plans is a suspension of the capital gains tax. The thinking is that this would encourage corporations to sell unwanted assets. But those assets are worth less then their original price, which means no one owes taxes on those assets. Just stupid.

The question now is: Will the markets melt down?

What happens next?

Are we going into a Great Depression? A deep recession? A regular recession? Something else? Something worse? Can we pull out of this while the financial world collapses? Washington Mutual just disappeared today, Thursday night. It's Friday morning and the market opens in a few hours.

Economic fireworks? Financial meltdown?

There is a global pool of investment money. Most of that money seeks safe places to invest. After the dot com bust, Alan Greenspan told investors to stay away from U.S. government bonds, the traditional place for safe investments.

Some smart person realized that housing loans and mortgages were really safe and stable investments. Houses almost never lose their value, and housing loans are only given to people with good credit. The problem is that housing loans are too small to be invested in by that international pool of global money.

So some smart people started buying up large amounts of housing loans and bundling them into pools that could be bought and traded. (Let's call them MBS (Mortgage Bull Shit).) These MBS bundles were then cut into chunks and sold to that global pool of investment money. And they loved it. Safe loans with high rates of return, and until every family had a home there was an endless amount of money to be made. But there's the problem: there is a finite amount of people who can afford to have a home, and an even smaller number who can afford to take another loan based on the value of their homes. The American public is in a vast amount of debt, and no one needs (or needed to) take out more credit on the potential value of their home. But they did. And the people on top (that global pool of investment money) said, "we want more!"

The people underneath them said, "We don't have any more!"

The people up top said, "Well, those guys over there have looser requirements for their loans and they're making money, so we take our business to them, or you follow what they're doing."

In less then a year, mortgage lenders were making VERY bad loans. Shortly after, they started going through poor neighborhoods and knocking on doors, asking people if they wanted to take a loan out on their home.

That was the beginning of the end. Shortly after, the housing bubble popped. People had been buying and trading houses, assuming that they would continue to go up in price. But actually, those housing loans were worthless, and had been artificially driving up the price of houses. So any housing loan made in the last few years is pretty much worthless.

Of course, it's all way more complicated than that, but that's the general picture.

---

All banks have been trading in those MBS (Mortgage Bull Shit) pools of housing loans. However, in those pools were tons of exceptionally bad loans - all of those loans made to poor people who had no money (the subprime loans).

But the rating agencies, who give grades to investments, kept giving those MBS pools the best grade, AAA. It turns out that the rating agencies weren't doing their job, and were too financially connected to the banks. Meanwhile, that international pool of investment money, despite the obvious, kept looking at that AAA rating, and thought the MBS pools were as safe as any other bet they could make.

When the bubble burst, the MBS pools had been spread out to everyone. Since the MBS all got AAA grades, the international pool of money thought they were safe. But suddenly, all these ticking time bombs hidden in the pools of housing loans started going off. And everyone panicked! EVERYONE had ticking time bombs hidden all over the place. No one knows where they are, since they are already tiny pieces of the MBS pools which were sold in even smaller pieces .

So now the Tarantino moment. Suddenly all of the banks pulled out their guns and pointed them to each others head in a giant circle jerk. See, all the banks owe each other money. That's just how it is. Just like all commercial banks owe us money. And that's fine until everyone wants to take out their money at the same time. If that happens, everything collapses. And that's what is happening. Everyone realizes that they don't have enough money to cover all their ticking time bombs, and they know that the others don't have enough money to cover thier ticking time bombs, so they're forcing each other to pay up. Right now.

---

( The Proposed Solution )

---

( A Better Solution )

---

( Some Lies from the Right and Left )

I haven't had anything to say. I've been sick, sleeping, reading, watching movies, not drawing.

I've been sick for the last several weeks. Went to the doctor (for the third time in 10 years) and found out I have bronchitis. Bronchitis isn't a big deal - just a virus in my lungs. As a present, I now have an inhaler, so I feel like a dorky 10 year old.

---

But ignore that.

Ignore the election, Palin MILF jokes, the death of David Foster Wallace, whatever else you fucking hear or read.


If it falls one way, it falls into a pit of Alien acid. If it falls the other way, it falls on a hard stone floor, which is better than a pit of Alien acid.

Everything almost fell into a pit of acid earlier this year. But the press, for the most part, didn't cover it because the story took longer then 30 seconds to describe. Even though the fate of the whole fucking country was at stake, and because of that, the state of good chunk of the world.


Basically, everyone was deluding themselves about the housing market. They thought it could never pop because houses are like here and like you live in them and stuff, so how can they become worth less, you know? It was that stupid. Anyway, now that the housing bubble has popped, there's A LOT of debt that can not be paid. All of that debt was incredibly high risk, but was chopped up and included in packages with safer debt, so everyone convinced themselves that there was NO RISK (sort of).


So that's the set up.


Until now.


But now everything is falling apart.

You and your friends are the investment banks. Your sister and her friends are the commercial banks. Your dad is the taxpayers/government/Federal Reserve. The loan to your stoner cousin is subprime housing loans (and the soon to be bad subprime credit loans).

And your situation? It has the possibility of mirroring your sister's great failure. The time her game crashed and cost your family its house and all of its money. Which was the Great Depression.


If the game stops, no new money for anyone. No new money, no new business. And there's been plenty of people yelling that the whole game is too dangerous, but no one listened. No one thought dad should get involved because the game was pretty damn good, damnit, and fuck dad anyway, we can do it on our own.

But you can't. Hopefully your loss doesn't extend to everyone's extended family.

This isn't just Bush's fault, btw. This is the fault of 30 years of bad policy. For 30 years, people have been screaming that the market can take care of itself. And that's kind of true, it can. In the past, when the market was unregulated, the market would crash every 10 or 15 years and would wipe out EVERYONE. The whole economy would crash, everyone would lose their jobs, a few ultra-rich people would stay afloat, and there would be general misery, sickness and death for everyone else. Read any fucking novel written before 1920 to get a picture of what went down (or any history book). But we won't learn our fucking lesson. There are serious gaps to market economies. It's a 'duh' thought except to the most pig-headed Milton Friedman worshiper, but there's too much money going to power-people for anyone to fix these systemic problems (and that definitely includes Obama (and McCain - he's even worse)).

A Massive Financial Collapse might be the result.

I've been trying to understand the recent market fluctuations, but the general media has done a horrible job of explaining what happened. The Economist, on the other hand, has done a great job.

Basically, think of a game of "Old Maid." Now imagine the Old Maid (the Queen of Spades) is bad loans. Everyone is trying to get rid of the Old Maid, and the last player (bank) left holding the Old Maid loses. Money is lost; that player is out; the game continues.

Recently the market has been chopping up the Old Maid. So now the Old Maid is no longer a single card, but a collection of different pieces spread among all the players. Ultimately, that's a good thing. It's the bank's job to minimize risk, and the new model means no one person/bank will get stuck with the Old Maid.

So here's the tricky part: The U.S. housing market was in a bubble. It was a game of Old Maid that recently ended. Now that the bubble is burst (the game is over), people want their money back. But since the Old Maid (the bad debts) are spread out in little pieces, no one knows who owes what and/or who has lost.

Worse, the market was corrupted recently - everyone was making money, so everyone was ignoring risk. Most banks and rating agencies pretended that the Old Maid was a good investment. (That is they actively went after bad loans and made-believe that they were good risk.)

Here's the next tricky part: the recent market fluctuations were caused by banks refusing to loan each other money. See, a few of the larger unregulated funds (hedge funds) have been investing LOTS of money into the Pieces of the Old Maid. Recently, a lot of the largest hedge funds have reported massive losses. Since no one knows who owns what, banks are no longer willing to loan each other quick money. (They're no longer passing cards from player to player.) It triggered a chain reaction and basically, all of the banks stopped loaning money to each other. (So no one is giving each other cards and no one knows who has which chunk of the Old Maid.)

This matters because our economy is in an incredibly precarious situation right now. We're strong, but based on a mountain of debt and an extremely dangerous and delicate foundation. It's too early to see if this has any lasting effects, but so far it looks like we made it out of this potential disaster unscathed.

Two articles from The Economist about the recent credit crunch:

1. International Banking: Is risk ending up in the right places?


2. Risk and the new financial order: Surviving the markets
   

Our nation is sick. Income inequality continues to grow and continues to threaten the future of the United States.

Look at the graph above. Notice the perfect symmetry connecting the two lines. Notice that when the majority is doing well, the rich are not, and vice-versa. Also notice that the "Republican Golden Age" of the 1940s and 1950s was dominated by normal people and wealth parity.

In 2005, total income increased 9%, but did we see any of that?

No, we did not.

The rich got richer and everyone else got poorer.

( More, more, more... )We've been in a class war since Reagan. So far, every president since him (Clinton definitely included) has been on the side of the super-wealthy. Anyone who brings up this shitty state of affairs is charged with trying to start a class war. But there already is a class war. And only the rich are winning.

Do we really want to go down that path of Russia and most of South America? Do we really want two worlds - one for the rich and one for the poor? This isn't natural. It's not pre-ordained. It hasn't always been this way.

The Republicans constantly break everything and then say, "See, it doesn't work!"

It's gotta stop.

( A couple of links... )