I’d like to know where they come up with numbers like 1 in 3 chance of recession.

Real GDP growth was essentially flat leading into the most recent problems in Europe and all the market volatility. Based on just that I’d say the chance is over 50% — and who’s to say I’m wrong.

People are going to have to wake up and see that obama is dead meat in 2012.

No one will have ever won re-election in this kind of economy, we are in uncharted territory.

And if you want to say 30s were worse, remember, FDR built credibility with Americans actually fighting for them even though he himself came from an elite background.

obama? just another sell out. He fully owns the deficit crises that is really A REVENUE CRISIS. He oversaw increasing bush tax cuts even though he ran against them.

We are in endless wars in middle east – he ran against Iraq war (in 2008 wrong war wrong time – he can’t lie his way out of this one)

He bailed out wall street (actually filled his cabinet with the banksters immediately after his election)

All we can hope for is to take over congress (house and senate) so that the next batsh!t crazy prez can’t actually do what he wants.

But the next prez ain’t gonna be obama because he literally has nothing to run on.

Better off in 2012 than 2008? The repugs haven’t rolled that one out yet, but it is gonna absolutely kill obama’s re-election bid.

because the budget deals put minor cutbacks into federal spending

I initially read this as “feral spending.” That’s sorta what it feels like these days.

a “hair on fire moment”…

We’ve got a bunch of those coming down the pike.

LOL.

“The Obama proposals he’s going to unveil in September ”

Hey, no hurry!

Ya can’t roll out the product in August. W taught us that.

Doesn’t two percent growth = Flat?

Obama has no product to roll out. The man hasn’t a clue about what to do and I doubt he would bother to fix the problem even if he could.

is it just a coincidence that john boner and daily kos are both orange?

Me thinks not…

It’s cute how Obama laughs and shrugs off the problems of the working poor, elderly and students, though. Isn’t it?

Bueller? ….Bueller?

It’s even more endearing when they say that anyone who cares about the working poor, elderly or students is a f’ing r@tard.

Policymakers are working to shore up confidence, but whether they will succeed is a difficult call.

No. Not difficult. Easy. They won’t.

Austerity! It’s bound to work someday….
/bs

Obama certainly has a limited circle of compassion, YSD, seems confined to a bubble defined by a beltway and a single section of street in the Big Yapple … I guess it is an astutely limited “cutesey” Mr. Osterity doth practice, quite expedient in its pragmaticism.

Few old, young, halting, infirm, or “unwealthy”.

But then, I reckon that’s the price of ‘leventy ‘leven master-chessery.

Real personal exceptionalism, no doubt.

DW

Looking forward, not backward … to the End Times

Now that’s an interesting electoral strategy — assume Obama’s rocket scientist political advisors have already thrown 2012′s election, and work like hell to keep the senate and house in democratic majorities in opposition to another Manchurian Candidate from Karl Rove.

One thing’s for sure — Krugman & the Firebaggers will be blamed/receive all the credit for Obama’s self inflicted defeat. He’ll be remembered as America’s first mixed race president, and for pushing the country over the edge into the hands of President Rapture & Vice President Tribulation.

It is just like throwing a ball up and expecting it to stay up there someplace. Every single time gravity returns it to the ground.

As long as they keep restrict the activities and income of the government while enriching the rich it’s going to crash. Trickle down prosperity is a hope thrown up in the air.. You can’t suspend the laws of nature.

They are doing the wrong things! Idiots.

They are already in some circles spreading the insinuation of racism among the liberals opposing Obama……. I assume that includes the black caucus.

Double dip is an ice cream cone in hell

Tens of millions in our country know that there’s zero chance of a double dip recession because for them, the odds of this unremitting depression will continue is 100%.

Unfortunately, it just won’t televised.

Know what? Maybe it’s too early to talk like this… but just who the fuck do they think they are? Where the fuck do they think programs thjat helped black people most would be without big time support from people like us. ANYBODY so much as implies that I’m guily of racism because I’m honest enough to say Obama sucks and won’t fool me again can just go kiss my ass.

I think it just proves how scared and craven the Obama cult is becoming.

Ask pizza magnate Cain whether racism is the trump card in death match class warfare. Obama should receive TR’s treatment, nothing more, nothing less. To do otherwise, is treason.

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”

“Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star”, May 7, 1918

Here’s something a little different to consider…
Growth is required for new jobs.
Growth of what? Wealth. Economic wealth. Goods and services.
Where is wealth created? Business. In fact, business is the only place wealth is created. This is important. Only business creates wealth.

The point of this being that when business is inhibited, wealth creation is reduced, and new jobs aren’t created. There are lots of reasons business can be inhibited. Taxes, regulations, and competition come to mind. So the question at the end of all this is to ask… Is what you advocate at any given time, helpful or hurtful to business?

I understand that this may offend some folks here, but it is our rock bottom tradeoff. Do you want more growth or not? Do you want more jobs or not? if you want those things one has to be business friendly, not business hostile.

Investors are running for safety of the high ground. The gold rush is on. Today
DOW industrial down 419 and Europe led with about 5% drop asia is down 1.5%, Eurpoe won’t stay fixed and they have thrown trillions at its sick bonds. Austerity policy is shrinking jobs there.
The deficit fight and the debt ceiling was a major trigger of the present fiasco.
The WH has the heads so far up their but they don’t know where forward and backward are. Wall street is relying on the Federal Reserve, the guys that refused to testify at the congressional hearing that they had sent 15 trillion out the backdoor to banks all over the world (That is the whole USA economy for one good year). Lies stacked on lies amounts to denial. Other officials refused to say where the TARP money was given.
Our crisis is a self regulating monetary system that let risk be leveraged 30 to 1 then flogged as securities based on S%Ps lies on the quality. Investors were skinned, homeowners saw their equity melt like ice on a summer day (still is. SO where is the sunshine as BO is still talking about offshoring more jobs?

As a liberal with the usual baggage of guilt I am not going to let this crowd stampede me into voting for an incompetent no matter the race.

In fact I am as outraged as any Democrat at Tom Coburn’s appalling comments on Obama and his race Link Here There are some choice comments on Medicare in this article also.

yup – just reeks over at that orange site. One diarist was seriously trying to misrepresents the most recent gallup polls (39 percent approval, 27% on economy) as some type of “success”, indicating he was a hands-on fav.

Business does NOT create wealth, the working class, transforming resources into energy or useful things creates wealth.

SMALL businesses do create jobs, far more than Corporations do.

What we have witnessed for thirty and more years is the pillaging of wealth and the destruction of its possibility by the vulture class, shooter.

DW

very moronic post, we have seen “business friendly” policies for almost a dozen years now – this is what we got.

I know, I know, I will stop offering food to these types.

Try creating wealth without labor. Capital, infrastructure and resources. New ideas that are inventive and more. It is much more complex than that. Gross domestic product, goods and services is what creates wealth. And you can grow the GDP with smaller profits. The greed factor is a destroyer. Business is not the citadel of wealth It is a tool to organize assests in a way that creates products and services. Many models exist more fail than succeed.

The only inhibition on business is that their real person management have all the people’s money. And giving them more money expecting it to stimulate buying still won’t work.

Growth that is unrestrained with nothing giving back to the host is a cancer. Like day after night it will kill what it feeds on and it dies.

All history and the real economists all point out the government is the job creator and consumer of last resort. It has to begin create and contract for jobs. People get a little money and voila the business folks will take over making jobs and hoarding money.until the next time.

If you want a solid safe predictable standard of living for most you have to change the system which is really monopoly with the quick fix by a rebellious people is close the game and redistribute the wealth. I favor a much more rational and predictable model.

Well, BB and TS, shooter must have stuck his/her fingers in his/her ears …

Verra quite, it seems.

I appreciate what both of you said.

Spot on, both of you

DW

LOL Yup.

I’m sorry guys but labor is like a group of people standing around with nothing to do, until someone with an idea and the money to pursue it comes along looking for help. Labor is a instrument, not the creator. That’s why business can move overseas using labor from elsewhere.

So you agree that crediting Obama on his merits or criticizing him on his lack thereof, is the way to go. Not racist dog whistling.

You know I am trying to not feel so deeply personally insulted. But I have no patience with racist dog whistling from any color. Rationally I do see it more as a sign of desperation. And after all when one has had it done to them such as in Tom Coburn’s scurrilous comments it is human nature to pick up the thrown stone.

Re the Coburn comments. I recall Obama and Coburn each saying they are good personal friends. No matter the toughness, his comments have to have gotten through enough to cause pain.

I just hate to see race still a factor in how we live together. It is so very sad.

We watched a program on public television this evening about the singing revolution in Estonia.

One thing that the people did in the process of declaring their independence was to register themselves as Estonians. They had USSR passports, but they wanted documentation that they were independent and so recorded their names in ledgers, and provided each signer a “Ticket to Siberia”. For all they knew, that was where they were going to end up if they continued to pursue the fight for freedom.

I wish all of us who are sick at heart at what the Democratic Party has become and sick to our stomaches at Osterity could sign a ledger and present ourselves with some sort of document that we could then use as a token, a tangible object, that we are done playing by their rules.

We can make our own rules. We just need a way to put them on notice.

Right, shooter, labor is just stupid folks who don’t have a clue until some one tells them what to do.

You are simply not worth a response henceforth.

The vulture class is composed of heartless asses like yourself.

Begone pipsqueak!

Wealth creation without labor?

That’s what happened to real asset values in the Main Street economy. It was hypothecated into 10X, 20X, 30X, 40X leveraged derivative casino bets that dwarfed both real assets and more importantly, any measure of normative returns from goods & services business.

When the casino system crashed, the financial masters who drove the Hindenburg into the tower, continued extracting wealth from the real economy and central banks to socialize their losses.

And this is why high unemployment that cuts operating costs for corporations drives stock prices UP. They don’t even pretend to care about 70% of U.S. GDP generated by consumer — e.i. working people’s — spending.

No, labor is not stupid. Stanford Phds can be labor, but someone has to hire them and tell them what they want done.
The thing most don’t get is that making something, or providing a service isn’t enough. Someone has to sell it, deliver it, make sure the raw materials keep coming, etc. etc. etc. It is the melding of all those elements that make a successful business, and as someone else mentioned above, businesses have a huge failure rate.

However the truism that business creates wealth remains. Look around you. Everything that you didn’t make yourself came from business. Everything. The creation of those things is the process of creating wealth. A recession is that process slowing down.

This is really the playing out of the cancer killing the host. The capitalists gaming the system with the money of people’s money or another way of saying it; in its own self destruction destroying the means and access to capital by consumer goods and services businesses.

However the truism that business creates wealth remains. Look around you. Everything that you didn’t make yourself came from business.

Wrong. Dead wrong. How about all the NASA direct and spawned operations? How about the huge gifts of public health programs — dating back to Hammurabi? No point in going further. If you have an interest how about really studying and thinking about it before posting such absurdities?

Each individual on this earth has worth and provides something of value. The ability to gamble on Wall street is not very high on my list of things of value.

Where is wealth created? Business. In fact, business is the only place wealth is created. This is important. Only business creates wealth.

You are correct. In the economic community only business (excepting government, which is bloated) can hire and pay people, and create wealth. And there are too many inhibiting factors curtailing business efforts, too much uncertainty about the market and about more government regulation and taxation, including new healthcare requirements.

Those of us who have started businesses know too well about the myriad of licenses and regulations that are placed on business start-ups. I just had dinner with a guy who wants to start a food stall business at a farmer’s market in the local city. Six licenses he had to get, each one requiring time and money, and all pointless to what he wants to do.

Workers don’t hire people — businesses do, ordinarily, but they aren’t now because of the ponderous government requirements — federal, state and municipal — which are all anti-business.

Here’s something a little different to consider. Workers build our civilization. Capitalists merely move money around. This would be a good time for the workers to run things, perhaps after a socialist revolution or three.

If you consider the only wealth is defined as dollar bills. You are missing many terribly important things. But even using that standard small business has very few dollar bills and is really not relevant in the economic community. The rules, regs and unfair taxation affect small business disproportionately because that is how the big money people want it.

It also cannot be forgotten that much of this wealth accumulation is a result of virtual grants of public resources — the people’e land and the minerals beneath the surface from gas and oil to broadcast bandwidths. Much of the immense wealth of the railroad barons came from huge land grants through which the rail lines were laid,

This practice today continues in our states and communities as all kinds of restrictions and taxes are lifted for large corporations which locate in the area. Small business doesn’t get such.

Small businessmen and women would do well to side with labor and the legislators who would legislate fairness through regulations, fees and taxes applied equally. Republicans do not do this.

This formulation is idiotic. The guy with the idea is labor too. Intellectual labor is not capital.

As an example of a business decision, I’ve mentioned before about the backpack tent I bought recently — a lightweight, high-tech low-volume product sold by an outfitter in Montana. Of course the tent isn’t actually made in Montana, or any other state, but in Asia, like so many other products.

Now I don’t know why the business owner made that business decision, but I CAN make an educated guess. Besides setting up a manufacturing facility, should he go through the myriad of HR problems, including hiring, payroll, taxes, withholding, etc etc or should he just farm the manufacture out to a no-sweat Asian manufacturer that will deliver a fine finished product right to his door, at less cost and definitely fewer headaches?

Multiply that business decision by a hundred thousand others and you understand why we are where we are. There are hundreds of outsourcing businesses in the U.S. who accommodate such business decisions, and they are good at what they do. Google “outsourcing companies.”

This is idiotic too. Intellectual labor does not need business before it does something. Intellectual labor panders after business because the whole of society has been caught in the fetish that money is. Remove the fetish, and intellectual labor is free.

NB: “Business” did not create the Internet you are using right now.

What is this? RedState? I imagine you all standing around seven centuries ago in Europe, blabbing the ideology that was popular then. “Only lords can create wealth; peasants don’t really do anything.”

Small business leads in two areas: Historically they have created the most new jobs, and they also are the most discriminated against because they can’t afford to bear the same ridiculous government requirements that apply to all business. These problems are not being addressed, nor will they be.

Seven centuries ago they would say this: “Small fiefdoms lead in two areas: Historically they have created the most new jobs, and they are also the most discriminated against because they have to pay for the ridiculous government requirements that apply in all kingdoms, as well as for the orders of knights.”

Well it’s a fact — poor people don’t hire anyone.

I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.

–Henry David Thoreau

Excellent point.

You’re forgetting that those things were paid for by taxes on business. The hardware for NASA was built by business. Govt. only takes, it doesn’t create.

Workers build our civilization. Capitalists merely move money around. This would be a good time for the workers to run things, perhaps after a socialist revolution or three.

Right. And who exactly is going to tell workers what to do? By your reasoning, the day laborers down at the home Depot waiting for a capitalist, should have self-organized and and be halfway into building a house.
Heh.

It also cannot be forgotten that much of this wealth accumulation is a result of virtual grants of public resources — the people’e land and the minerals beneath the surface from gas and oil to broadcast bandwidths. Much of the immense wealth of the railroad barons came from huge land grants through which the rail lines were laid,

Tsk. Do you think minerals, gas and oil, just jumped up out of the ground and into containers? Perhaps you think rail lines appeared out of nowhere, or that the gift of property grants it’s owner magical powers?
Of course not. Without business to perform those functions, all you have is dirt. The only thing Govt did was take land from the original inhabitants, and give it to someone else.

Spot on.

Intellectual labor does not need business before it does something. Intellectual labor panders after business because the whole of society has been caught in the fetish that money is. Remove the fetish, and intellectual labor is free.

So what? An idea is useless until it is made concrete.

NB: “Business” did not create the Internet you are using right now.

Oh really? Whose taxes paid for DARPA? Who made my computer, the wireless router, the cable it flows through, and all the other connections it interacts with? Business.

Labor is a instrument, not the creator.

Abraham Lincoln thought differently. Labor is the *creator* of wealth, capital is the manipulator of it.

-stewartm

Tsk. Do you think minerals, gas and oil, just jumped up out of the ground and into containers?

No, *labor* extracted it. No bank managers needed to be involved.

stewartm

Now I don’t know why the business owner made that business decision, but I CAN make an educated guess.

I can guess too–the same short-sighted idiocy that passes as business “wisdom” among capitalists. Eschew plentiful labor here in the US, where it is in surplus, the US also being the market where most of those items will be purchased, to take advantage of slave cheap labor overseas, all the while consuming a heulluva lot more non-renewable fossil fuels in the process of shipping raw materials and finished goods here and yonder. As opposed to making the goods closer to the source of the people who will actually being consuming it.

The latter only makes sense because capitalists have heavily subsidized fossil fuels, including by fighting wars.

-stewartm

Small business leads in two areas: Historically they have created the most new jobs

Jobs that only exist because there are large businesses nearby that pay the good wages which allow their products or services to be used.

Flint Michigan isn’t the poster city for economic hardship because it lacks small businesses. There are still plenty there.

-stewartm

Well it’s a fact — poor people don’t hire anyone.

Outstanding observation!

Now, let’s get to a discussion about an economic system that mandates *why* those poor people have to be poor. Why, for every Donald Trump, this system creates a million Jackie Browns. (As per the John Cougar Mellencamp song).

Here’s a hint: creating more Donald Trumps isn’t the solution.

-stewartm

I doubt any will see this but your strange use of the term wealth still sticks in my craw. You appear to speak only of dollars. If that is the case then governments who print dollars are the only creators of wealth in your frame. Then by saying that someone needs to tell what labor which you describe as untermenschen what to do you are defining it as ideas. Of course that then makes your whole theory fall apart. Even untermenschen have ideas.

Then you claim that sucking minerals out of the land creates wealth. No the minerals are the wealth, indeed among the first “dollars.”

I fear your brain has been so shrunken by the Koch brothers’ CATO and Ayn Rand that you have lost the capacity to understand that dollars are not wealth but only symbolic of what they will buy. The immensely wealthy financiers are good at collecting dollars. They loan them to other people who — by sucking the minerals out of the land or the brains of people with ideas — collect what the dollars will buy and give a skimmed amount back to the dollar collectors.

Then you really get bizarre in saying capital is not capital if it comes from (in a democracy) consenting taxpayers. The role of capital in creating or developing things that sell is not related to where it comes from. If that were the case then you would have to say that the money made from extraction of minerals is not wealth creation but taking from taxpayers and giving it to individuals.

Dollars are not wealth. In fact I would say wealth is not created. It is. Wealth ie value. It just is.. The money collectors, should I say “money changers”? really just devise ways to profit by finding ways to move it around and convince others to give up access to other things in favor of what they are selling.

In case you see this, I stipulated above (#23)I was talking about economic wealth, goods and services.

If that is the case then governments who print dollars are the only creators of wealth in your frame. Goods and services are a whole different things. That means the minerals in the earth are wealth and no man created them. Services require capacities inherent in in men. That means your untermenchen possess that wealth.

Sorry but your ideas have no internal coherence. — They come from works of fiction such as Atlas Shrugged.

“Poor people” are a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION. Do you think they come out of the womb with “POOR” written on their foreheads? Give someone wealth, and they’re rich. Take it away, and they’re poor.

Government works are not “paid for by taxes.” Government creates money out of nothing. Learn something about dollar hegemony.

And who exactly is going to tell workers what to do?

Management, a subset of labor.

By your reasoning, the day laborers down at the home Depot waiting for a capitalist, should have self-organized and and be halfway into building a house.

Only idiots like you think that capital is necessary for that to happen.

Whose taxes paid for DARPA? Who made my computer, the wireless router, the cable it flows through, and all the other connections it interacts with? Business.

Can you show me the factory where they all wear suits and discuss stocks and bonds? LABOR made your computer and its accessories.