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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Shrinking money supply and collapsing housing market
- 29396 reads
Senate fails to extend unemployment benefits
- 26724 reads
GDP Shrunk at 0.9% Rate in 2nd Quarter on Weaker Consumer Goods, Construction, & Inventories
- 82754 reads
Employee Abuse Runs Rampant In America
- 140980 reads
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 139478 reads
Shrinking money supply and collapsing housing market
- 29396 reads
Senate fails to extend unemployment benefits
- 26724 reads
GDP Shrunk at 0.9% Rate in 2nd Quarter on Weaker Consumer Goods, Construction, & Inventories
- 82754 reads
Employee Abuse Runs Rampant In America
- 140980 reads
The Golden Rule
- 1822424 reads
Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
- 1209651 reads
New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
- 939541 reads
How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
- 349210 reads
VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
- 331361 reads
U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
- 312770 reads
House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
- 303808 reads
The war on the middle class
- 301521 reads
Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
- 275707 reads
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I linked to this in a post at my site. That part about the $1 subsidy was not clear to me before this.
Now it is.
Hopefully your prediction will come true but....
We all know that rebuilding our energy infrastructure is the only way to for our civilization to survive. I'm going to get off my butt and finish my post on that and post it here to start. It should be a big one.
Thanks for this good look which posits something other than CW bullbleep.
Um.
Value does not equal Profit. The primary corporate responsibility is to create *Value*. You can create absolutely no profit and still create value.
Folks, please register if you want to really have a discussion. We don't release any of your stuff, registration is simply for spam control as well to make sure people are arguing the issues. It's all security but unfortunately due to security your comments must go into a moderation queue. Register and you can just post as well as write up your own views on this.
Secondly, that's right, under the current definitions, tax code and law, Haliburton moved to Dubai. Cisco is planning on moving to China and foreign nations buy up US assets at a fire sale. China has bought up many manufacturing companies or they move to China where it is required to partner with a state owned Chinese corporation.
So, considering what is going on right now, what is the issue with modifying corporate tax code as well as the actual charter to make corporations be more in the US national interest and America's interest?
Let's look at the stats please. What policies, say Japan's not only make them extremely competitive, profitable but also their people prosperous and not with a massive trade deficit? This isn't about ideology, it's really about keeping the United States economically strong. Micro economics, or corporate economics, the way US policy and corporate law is, makes it in their best interest to often act against the United States. There is no conflict in keeping these US corporations highly profitable yet modifying law and policy to also ensure they are working for the US national interest.
Changing the law does not imply in the least that suddenly these business entities would be weakened. If anything it implies they would be stronger over the long run.
As it is multinational corporations have almost a free for all. Does one honestly believe that corporations will not continue to headquarter offshore or move around the globe depending upon conditions as it stands? Regulation is almost a joke at this point so does one really want to further enable the poisoning of kids, child labor, pollution of the world as these corporations hunt the globe to find nation-states even more favorable to their profit agenda? What makes people think they will not relocate in Burma...so where does the buck stop? When people are plain enslaved all for the agenda of profit? And since when does slave economics means that the global economy operates best? If one looks back at those sorts of systems if anything, looking at raw profit numbers, that will collapse a global economy for one has simply wiped out any chance of a middle class, which happens to be a consumer class.
Who is not in the real statistical world here?
Your arguments are the same that come up every time a proposal to hold corporations accountable for their actions. It came up for OSHA, it comes up with Union rights, in came up in the formation of anti-monopoly laws. Yet every one of those things has served to make the lives of the employees and consumers better, and as a result the whole nation, including the regulated companies, got wealthier. The EU has more corporate regulation then the US, would you care to track the value of the Euro vs the Dollar? Or we could look at a company that is left unregulated to just persue profit, Halliburton. We gave them $21 billion and very little oversight, and they moved their headquarters to Dubai and very little of that money, and none of the infrastructure that it bought is going to be seen by the US once the war is over.
Firstly she is quoting the corporate tax code, secondly she is by far, not the only legal expert pointing this out...
there was in fact a President who ran on these facts, Teddy Roosevelt.
Your argument is most spurious since you cannot attack the legal definitions which she and others quote.
I think if you go to the hearing and read some of the proposals (this one is on redefining the corporate charter), you will see a series of carrot and sticks on corporate tax code to give corporations breaks for being loyal to the nation.
I would say the corporations are slapping America in the face and nowhere did I see any proposal or idea that would make US corporations less competitive in this hearing.
This is absolutely counter to the foundation of a corporation. That is, a corporation exists, as a private entity, to maximize shareholder wealth. Right or wrong, that is the purpose of the corporation. Somehow Ms. Blair has no Juris Doctor but appears to be thoroughly involved with the corporate law program at Vanderbilt. Even at my law school, which was no Vanderbilt, every law professor had a JD from a first tier law school. How could these arguments by Ms. Blair or the foundations "supporting" them ever be taken seriously if she's studied everything but law itself?
Why not address the underlying Constitutional legal issue at hand? That is, why do corporations in general trump their individual right to protections under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America over an individual citizen's right to those same protections, namely privilege and immunity.
So lets see here...the answer to keeping jobs here in the USA is to create more bureaucracy for corporations to wade through. What do you think the real reason companies have left this country? Taxes and regulation. Create more of it and they will leave even faster. There is no law you can pass to keep it from happening. The only way to get them to come back is to *reduce* regulation, and *lower* taxes. As a corporation why would I stay in a country that seeks to punish me the more successful I get?
The idea that corporations are in a 'lawless' environment is laughable. There are so many hoops and regulations that a corporation that must go through it is insane.
Honey works better than a big slap in the face. Look at it from the angle of a CEO of a corporation. They want to make a profit. If the USA keeps slapping them every which way when they try to do this...why stay in the USA? China is attractive because strangely enough they are more of a free market than the good ole US of A.
It is my opinion that there is near zero difference between the Republicans and Democrats on on, really the only, meaningful economic issue. That is that both parties fully support business interests above populist interests. In effect what we have, given that the two parties swap who is in powere every few election cycles, is a Fascist Oligarchy, not the Democracy (pedantic: Republic) that is touted.
Where the Republicans and Democrats differ is on emotional issues like abortion, religion, gun control. None of these issues effects in any way the true business of government, and that is a framework that supports the interests of BIG business.
No, the outcome of the 2008 elections will not effect the core economic direction of the USA one whit. Democrats may fiddle with the minimum wage; the Republicans will make a big stink about it and do a lot of hand wringing. But, nothing will be done in any meaningful way that will affect government support for Big Business.
I know in engineering the salaries are pretty much at or below what they were in 1997/1998. If you're up for it a detailed (with statistics, graphs) analysis on just how badly the US middle class is affected would be good. I personally believe there are inflection points when they started outsourcing, plus the China PNTR deal kicked in and manufacturing left in droves. Add to that insourcing (bringing in cheap foreign labor to displace US citizens, labor arbitrage) I would not be surprised to see yet another inflection point in overall US wages correlating to those events. But, I haven't analyzed it in depth, would be a very good analysis topic.
With 75% of this country earning less by their labors than they could, I personally think we haven't really been out of recession since 1998.
But that's using recession in a different way than most economists do- as a measure of living up to human potential instead of as a measure of how much the rich can soak the consumers for stuff they can provide for themselves without money.
One thing that you here few ever say is that there is more than one type of capitalism out there. America only practices one type of capitalism, and it isn't laissez-faire.
Our type of capitalism has been rigged to the benefit of the ruling class, which is the worst of both worlds. But since the working class still doesn't identify itself as being part of the "have nots", this dysfunctional system continues.
I wrote a diary a week or so ago called "Measuring the Decline of America" that agrees with point you raise.
A lot of times I seem to play the role of the curmudgeonly contrarian on the blogosphere, arguing that while things may not be going so well, the sky isn't falling either.
The ridiculous inequality in the sharing of the fruits of American effort are why 80% of Americans think this country is on the wrong track, and they are correct.
Why does it really matter whether we are in a recession or not. The real question is how much investors make, and how much money workers make. For the most part all the economic growth goes to giving investors more money, while labor gets screwed. If labor received a larger slice of the pie, working people could make more money without growth.
Furthermore, what good are really being produced in GDP? Can gambling contribute to GDP? I think these issues more detailed study.
Regardless if this is a flood or an erosion, from the daily news millions are betting their live savings and losing it daily.
I don't know about you, but I see this as a national crisis and yet we have an election season focusing in on trivialities and "gotchas". It's truly fiddles while Rome burns to me.
I specifically reserved that label just for them because of their consistency of being wrong, refusing to listen to logic, and their dedication to cheerleading above all else. I didn't accuse them of being morons just because they are optimistic.
I've been wrong about the economy before, and I will be again. It's entirely possible that now is one of those times.
However, I feel so strongly that the American economy is in serious trouble, and that it will get worse (although I don't pretend to know the timing), that I've bet my lifesavings on it.
I'm wondering if midtown's coyote is simply in an updraft of the canyon.
I've just read both of these blog posts and the commonality that I see is both are saying we need dramatic policy change, now is it a dribble or a flood, I don't know.
I wonder how much discussion goes on about our own government's use of h1bs and consulting firms that use them. How much offshoring of government work happening also needs to be documented and brought into the light. It isn't just the private sector thats giving the country away. Think about being a laid off IT worker supporting your state's use of an h1b programming body shop with your unemployment comp tax dollars - thats what I'm talking about.
Help get Mad in America on NPR - Download a free copy here, send one to your congress people - tell your friends and grumpy uncles about it.
http://www.madnamerica.com
There are good reasons to question Shadowstats. As I have posted here, one needs to reality-test economic statistics by asking what they predicted. In the case of Shadowstats, they predict that growth was terrible throughout the 1990s (because the official statistics would over-estimate growth by under-correcting for inflation).
But the public felt that growth was only bad from 1990-1994, which is why they threw out first GHW Bush and then the 103rd Congress. From 1995-2000, they felt that things were better, so they retained both President Clinton and the 104th/5th/6th Congress and, of course, narrowly elected Al Gore.
Granted, public sentiment doesn't follow growth precisely because of distributional issues. There are other reality tests one might use, such as business bankruptcies or other measures of economic stress. Those show steadily declining bankruptcies from 1992 onward (though with a burst of public company bankruptcies around the time of the dot com bust).
Shadowstats... caveat emptor.
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