From Stark
In the wake of the debt ceiling showdown between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans, Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz called on U.S. corporate executives to join him in refusing to contribute to political campaigns until the President and his foes agree on a long-term plan to reduce the debt and the deficit.
Now, Schultz says many executives are taking the pledge.
Yahoo! news blogger Rachel Rose Hartman reports.
Schultz is taking this movement pretty seriously. He and his allies recently launched this website to promote the cause. It contains, among other things, Schultz’s Letter to America. (Clicking on the link takes you to the movement’s Facebook page.)
Schultz is asking his peers to do more than just zip their wallets when political fundraisers come calling. He is also asking them to join him in pledging to do some hiring and convert their cash reserves into payroll dollars for Americans who need jobs.
“Banks are afraid to lend. Record levels of cash are piling up in corporate treasuries, idling. That cash is not being used to expand operations, train new workers, underwrite new ventures, or spark innovation. The only way to break this cycle of fear is to break it,” Schultz says.
Brilliant. Get corp execs with a social conscious to stop contributing, while the Koch Bros. et al. run amok. That is EXACTLY what we need.
“FROM the earliest age, we are taught to participate in our society. Vote, or don’t complain about the actions of those who win office.
Howard Schultz’s call to refrain from donating to political campaigns is an abdication of that individual responsibility to take part in determining our own future. It is a call that should be ignored.
Schultz is right that the nation stands at the brink of a fiscal calamity…
Hardly has there been a starker philosophical difference between the two sides than the debate over the size and influence of government…..
Which side is right? Next year’s elections are the opportunity Americans have to render their verdict….
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2015993705_guest24wilson.html
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
AFY, there won’t be any real choices. It will come down to voting for who stinks (to you) the least.
Your way too young to be this cynical, young man, now see what politics does for you!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Hope this cheers you up!
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s08e08-douche-and-turd
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
It really did. By the way, I was only referring to “Presidency 2012″.
While not without a downside, I think Schultz’s idea is the best I’ve seen so far and I’m pleased to learn that it is catching on. Whatever gets their attention, and with politicians, money seems to talk, so withholding it might be enough to draw their attention. With a tiny few exceptions, these clowns in D.C. need to be outright flushed. Their behavior and arrogance, most notably of late, is absolutely nauseating and totally undeserving of re-election. I just hope the voters can maintain memory of the events long enough to vote accordingly when the time comes. Voters seem to have inordinately short memories when it comes to these things.
It would be illuminating to track the prior-year contributions of Mr. Schultz’ signatories, I’m sure. They’re all lefties, I’m betting. Mr. Petersen might be an exception, at least in part.
Mr. Schultz can’t bring himself to publicly criticize Obama in the manner that he would like, so he pretends that this initiative is bipartisan, and that his criticism is aimed toward both parties.
The truth is that Obama has made a hash of things, so that Mr. Schultz thinks that only financial starvation might bring him to his senses.
We’ll see.
AFY – that little excerpt had me laughing. That columnist sure did get confused about the difference between participation through our civic duty to vote for our representatives and the choice to contribute to any one campaign.
That persons is basically saying CEOs should be required to donate to campaigns, and, frankly, that’s ridiculous.
THESE are the times that try men’s souls…
Thomas Paine
My man Sam, Methinks the columnist is saying today is not the time to be on the sidelines or sitting on one’s hands, our responsibility, our social responsibility is to get involved, vote, participate and work for what you believe to be right.
I know I am.
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
While we are at it, let’s pass real campaign finance reform: Campaign contributions ONLY from individual constituents registered in the congress persons district. No corporate contributions, no PAC contributions, no lobbyist contributions. Contributions ONLY from those who elected that Member of Congress. It’s time for all of them to start representing US, not their political party or special interest groups!
Dream on HiGuy. Keep in mind AFY and his kind will be busy “working for what [they] believe to be right.” because it’s good at the top.
Trillions doled out to Wall Street and large corporations to subsidize profits and bonuses. The richest 400 Americans wealthier than half of all Americans. The top 1% have received 80% of all income growth over 30 years, and now have40% of the nation’s wealth.
CEO compensation up 27% in 2010, the largest increase in history. Bank CEO pay up 36% to average $9.7 million. Sales of private jets, luxury cars, multi-million dollar estates, jewelry, etc. soaring.
Meanwhile, sixty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. 29% of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed. Forty-five million Americans live in poverty. One of four children live with hunger. Record numbers of veterans homeless and unemployed. Millions thrown into the streets by the nation’s banks. Millions more suffering predatory student loans. 60% of graduates unable to work in their field. A choice between no credit or usury. U.S. income inequality now ranks between Uganda and the Ivory Coast, below Pakistan, Kazakhstan and Ethiopia.
And right wing posters are busy postulating more economic double-speak. The extreme right has a war chest with hundreds of millions to spend on their absurd propaganda.
Remember the above facts when voting for that Republican Tea Party extremist in 2012.
@ g.h.
We have no disagreement on anything you say……but I will continue to work hard for a better life for all which is why my grandparents came here over 100 years ago. Vote for a Tea Party extremist??? Would NEVER vote for anything Tea Party! Meanwhile I’ll dream on……and try to not get too cynical though most days that’s impossible.
What kind of country do we want?
Do we want a country where there is opportunity, where because of our wealth, because of our prosperity there is the opportunity for someone who was bought up poor to have the chance to start a business, create their own wealth for themselves and their families and others in their community that may need their help.
In this type of society you have the chance to be successful by your efforts not because of your last name or because those who know what’s best for the rest decides it so, you can do it with hard work if there is opportunity.
A free society that can allows for the most individuals choices is a prosperous society because of its freedom! Innovation feeds off freedom!
Or is the better society one where individuals choice are limited by those who know what is best for the rest, that thru their planning and regulating they stifle opportunity, because their planning and regulating is what is best for the rest, not freedom, not wealth, wealth should be taken, it should be redistributed by those who know what is best for the rest!
If the freedom of the individual must always be secondary to the needs of the collective, opportunity is what suffers the most!
And when opportunity suffers so does the ability of the individual to chose and then there goes freedom!
It is the direction and not the magnitude which is to be taken into consideration.
Thomas Paine
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
As I’ve said before, elites and the wannabes love the illusion of their rugged individualism; their own propaganda how their success is somehow a result of character and not privilege, subsidization and manipulation of the system.
Tell me Joe, just how much of your vaunted opportunity will there be for the undernourished child, sent to an underfunded school, whose parents are unable to afford college in competition with a bunch of rich kids with MBAs family money and an uncle who works at the bank?
Remember, a few exceptions aren’t the rule; they prove the rule. And quit quoting Tom Paine, you don’t get it. We’ve been headed in the wrong “direction” too long.
Society needs a safety net for those who are fallen but not a hammock that makes one wants it comfort instead of hard work!
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine
Virtues are acquired through endeavor, Which rests wholly upon yourself….
Thomas Paine
The more we have prosperity(wealth) the more we have opportunity(jobs) and the less we have the undernourished or the underfunded.
It is all about direction, do we want a society that promotes dependence or one that supports independence, opportunity, and freedom!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
Thomas Paine
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
As I said, you just don’t get it, Joe.
Paine was a revolutionary. In your mouth his words lose their meaning.
Tom Paine was about overthrowing hereditary wealth and power, here and in Europe.
Quit trying to use him to rationalize the re-institutionalization of the very institutions he sought to overthrow.
TP was for freedom, freedom of speech, and he was against tyranny, the tyranny of over reaching government! We be bros!!
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
Thomas Paine
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
As I said, Joe, you’re long on quoting, but, short on understanding.
People who argue that government is a necessary evil should put a little more stress on the “necessary.” There are lots of places on earth where there is no government. Real estate prices are quite low in all those places.
Hey John, from now on it will be a “NECESSARY” evil!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
This is an example of how evil the “NECESSARY” can be!
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s10e09-mystery-of-the-urinal-deuce
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“…Foggy rhetoric about “burdens” that will “fall on our children and grandchildren” sets the tone of discussion….But there isn’t, in fact, a “long-term deficit problem.” So long as interest rates stay below the growth rate, as they are, debt-to-GDP levels eventually stabilize and even decline. The notion that there is a big problem is pure propaganda based on a pseudo-debate….
The entire object of this propaganda campaign is to cripple government—including regulation and the courts—and to roll back Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.”
(“Stop Panicking About Our Long-Term Deficit problem. We don’t have one”, James Galbraith)
The pirates of finance use the fictitious “debt crisis” much like the “War on Terror” was used to drain the Treasury; that actually created the debt.
The “debt crisis” is just a public relations ploy to undermine Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, the institutions that protect the old, the sick, and the elderly, Wall Street’s “last frontier” for exploitation.
The debt crisis is a scam designed to foreclose on progressive era reforms that lifted working people from squalor and provided them with a decent living.
Now those policies are under-fire from financial elites who want to turn back the clock, crush the middle class, and make us all serfs in a neo-feudal world.
ghk, Thank gawd you are here.
“In absolute numbers, the total public debt as of Aug. 11 was $9.924 trillion, and the intra-government debt was $4.666 trillion, for a total of $14.587 trillion. That’s well over 300 million times the country’s median household income. Stacked as dollar bills, it would reach 920,953 miles high, almost four times as far from Earth as the moon…..
…It’s the debt’s size relative to gross domestic product that matters, just as personal debts must be measured against a person’s income before they can be properly evaluated. The GDP of the United States was $15.003 trillion at the end of the first quarter in 2011. That makes the public debt equal to 66.1% of GDP and the intra-governmental debt 31.1%. Total debt is now 97.2% of GDP and climbing rapidly….
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576510660976229354.html
IMHO it is the wrong direction folks!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!
You want to talk about things that will drag the country down, and be a real burden on generations to come? Well, it ain’t the national debt, Joe. No matter how many right wing pundogandists you cut and paste here.
Worry about the wildly divergent opportunities between the classes. Worry about the wholesale sellout by politicians of both parties to the new patricians of the financial realm. Think about the toxic debts transferred to the public to bailout the casino capitalists in our banks.
We took on obligations, secured by junk mortgages and the like paying the banksters 100 cents on the dollar, when in reality, we owned them. Then turned around, borrowed the money we gave them at interest rates that made them more profitable than they’d ever been.
It’s time to quit parroting the party line, Joe. Do some real research and quit being the local apologist for the worst criminals in our country’s history. Worse than the robber barons!
“By following today’s apologists of the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the so-called ‘welfare’ states pumped too much money (which they didn’t have) into consumption: into pensions for all (Europe), exorbitant armament (US), endangered industries (both), and finally bailouts for ailing mortgage banks (also both). This intervention was celebrated by Keynes’ disciples as the ‘return of politics’. In reality the hopelessly over-indebted states only exacerbated the crisis. Today they are locations of insecurity.
Those who argue that the state should be active with funds, subsidies and interventions – in short that it should perpetuate the debt economy – turn the wheel in exactly the wrong direction….
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/08/failure-of-keynesianism.html
There’s that direction thing again!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Define consumption and endangered industries. When I imagine endangered industries I automatically think coal. I mean that’s why they are having to sell the country’s resources they dig from our ground to Asia to prophet a few greedy yahoos here who have no allegiance to this country. We’re phasing it out, as is most of the enlightened world. So why are you pretending to support sane economics when you are just an enabled for the exact opposite. And where did you go to school? That district needs an overhaul….
“The use of coal will rise 53% over the next 20 years….
The IEA says that in 2010 global coal consumption went up by 10.8%. In comparison to this, global demand for gas and oil rose by 7.4% and 3.1%. Coal has been the fastest growing fuel for the past few years and today coal’s share in global energy consumption is at its highest since 1970 (29.6%).
http://www.worldcoal.org/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is ‘rash’ to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years. The objections which are raised are mostly not the objections of experience or of practical men. They are based on highly abstract theories – venerable, academic inventions, half misunderstood by those who are applying them today, and based on assumptions which are contrary to the facts…Our main task, therefore, will be to confirm the reader’s instinct that what seems sensible is sensible, and what seems nonsense is nonsense.”
(John Maynard Keynes)
He was way ahead of you, Joe.
“Every time you hear an American politician analogize the nation’s budget to a family budget (as, sadly, President Obama has done), you should know the politician is not telling the truth. The truth is just the opposite. Our national budget can and should counteract the shrinkage of family budgets by running larger deficits when families cannot….
Despite what Standard & Poor’s says… our current crisis is jobs, wages, and growth. We do not now have a debt crisis.”
Robert Reich
….I was astounded this month when the Federal Reserve announced its intention to keep interest rates at zero percent for at least the next two years. I kept staring at that number, 2013, assuming that it was a mistake. Surely the governors meant 2012, which would have been bad enough, I thought. But at least 2013? What is going on, I wondered. Why put a fixed date on it at all? Now their hands are really tied!
I have been a community bank owner and was president of a bank that served hundreds of community bankers for more than 20 years. I have always known that the model of community banking is different from that of Wall Street banks. Unlike Wall Street banks, which make their money based on volume and transaction fees, community banks make their money the old-fashioned way. They pay their customers interest on their hard-earned savings, they lend those deposits back into their communities to small businesses that create jobs, and they price those deposits and loans to make enough on the difference to pay their employees and utility bills, and maybe even to purchase a scoreboard for their local high school football team.
That is, until now.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/feds-rate-policy-leaves-no-relief-for-main-street-banks/2011/08/25/gIQAgo0heJ_story.html
Another very bad direction!
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
I’s got only one thing to say:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk&feature=player_embedded
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
In the period following Lehman’s collapse, when the banksters were on their knees, fundamentally bankrupt, propped up with worthless mortgages and funny papers from AIG, our representatives had a choice.
The entire mortgage debt of Americans at the time was some $13 trillion. The bankers were turning to the taxpayers to bail them out. Instead of getting something for the $13 trillion for average Americans, our representatives gave some $13 trillion to the banksters instead, and propped them up so they could go about foreclosing and throwing our neighbors into the street.
Had our representatives guaranteed homeowners instead, the real estate crisis would have been averted, our equities would have been preserved, payments would have kept coming in to bankers, and the economy would have struggled, but not tanked.
The reason they tanked the economy was to crush the middle class and strip people’s assets. It’s the oldest form of economic crime, predatory lending.
Folks, government represents the banks, and their job is to make your children and grandchildren serfs on the land, slaves in their factories, and generally faceless peons with no direction home.
How does it feel?
“They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare, but only to lay taxes for that purpose. To consider the latter phrase not as describing the purpose of the first, but as giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.” –Thomas Jefferson, Opinion on National Bank, 1791
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
“The central bank has to be, in a way, a neutral player, and yet we find ourselves trying to stimulate, and the effect is further leveraging,” he said. “If I thought zero rates would bring jobs, I’d want it forever. But it distorts the economy….In 2003, when we lowered rates and kept them there because unemployment was 6.5 percent — look at the consequences.” Thomas M. Hoenig
Those consequences included the nation’s mortgage feast, followed by its current economic famine.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/anything-peaceful/hayek-unsung/
Poor Mr. Hoenig. Still doesn’t get it.
The bubble wasn’t fueled by low rates, it was fraud in the loan origination sector, fraud in the securitzation of worthless paper, fraud by ratings agencies being paid by the banks to bless their worthless securities, fraud, fraud, fraud …
Look who got rich and I’ll show you who stole the money.
This was written in 2008:
“I hope my readers understand the problem of interest rates, which are artificially low and below the rate of inflation. This forces investors, including individuals, institutional investors, and state and private pension funds, into risky investments, which as we have now seen can also lead to widespread losses. In fact, the losses are now so large that they threaten the entire financial system. I estimate that, when all is said and done, the losses experienced by the financial sector and investors brought about by Mr. Greenspan’s and Mr. Bernanke’s irresponsible monetary policies will exceed several trillion US dollars if we add up the combined capital losses on homes, nongovernment bonds, and equities….
At the same time, the US must be increasingly careful about its budget deficits and about bailing out the entire financial sector, which is loaded with crappy paper.
Otherwise, Treasury securities will reach “junk status” sooner than I had expected. But I can very confidently predict that, in the long term, US debt will become “junk”!
http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/interest-rates-8/2008/03/06/
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
…In a fiat-money regime, where money is produced through bank circulation credit, the market interest rate will necessarily be pushed to below the natural interest rate as determined by peoples’ true time preference (that is, the pure interest rate adjusted for risk and inflation premiums).
This downward manipulation of the interest rate provokes an economically unsustainable boom, which must be followed by bust. Who can deny that the boom and bust is a consequence of fiat money — which is, in turn, a creature of government intervention in monetary affairs?
http://mises.org/daily/5164/The-Cure-Low-Interest-Rates-is-the-Disease
AFY!!thehelotsheepdog!!!
You mean “fiat money” like the colonial script used by our founders? Hey if it was good enough for our founding fathers ain’t it OK, Joe?
The problem isn’t fiat money, Joe, it’s fractional reserve banking. That’s the real franchise to print money, and collect interest on what you’ve created out of thin air.
Why “We the People” decided to give this power to the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds is beyond me.
Oh, that’s right, we didn’t! It was the bankers who decided.
“From the perspective of the Austrian school of economics (the only true economic theory!), this is not going to be the ordinary kind of inflation, either, but the really nasty, evil kind, where “monetary policy pushes the market rate of interest below the natural rate of interest (the societal time-preference rate), thereby necessarily causing malinvestment rather than ushering in an economic recovery.”
In other words, the Fed and the government are making it worse…..
Read more: A Monetary Policy that Encourages Malinvestment http://dailyreckoning.com/a-monetary-policy-that-encourages-malinvestment/#ixzz1WTDnQvtS
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNsdwTbvV90&feature=player_embedded
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
Go read your Hayek again, Joe.
The “malinvestment” isn’t current monetary or fiscal policy, it was the excessive and unwise investment in housing beginning in the 90s. We are now dealing with the consequences, capital is tied up in international reserves (and banks fearful of lending) depriving enterprises of working capital.
All this is further exacerbated by lack of effective demand; which both Mises and Hayek understood would stall any economy and similarly results from too concentrated wealth.
It is not a problem that began with Clinton and Greenspan; or one that will be corrected by tax or monetary policy. The problem is the result of fundamental changes in economic policy beginning with Reagan.
They were: trade policy that is explicitly designed to put manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in Mexico, China and other developing countries; the high dollar policy put in place by a Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs during the Clinton administration; allowing the largest banks to benefit from an implicit policy that allows them to take great risks with the government effectively providing the insurance; and anti-union policies generally in labor relations.
The US economy will not recover until there is what the Austrians called “effective demand.” This is not going to come from Chinese or Indian consumers. It will only come after we get the international banking cartel out of Washington, and government policy is first and foremost focused on restoring Americas industrial base; where economic activity is actually productive, not simply a measure of the velocity of money circulating among a few banksters.
“Edward Leamer and Russ Roberts have explained how the boom/bust cycle has been shaped by government policy, and directed into such sectors as housing and finance. In Hayek’s economics housing is a long-term production good, an open target for malinvestment — and the idea that the boom / bust malinvestment cycle can take many different forms is fully consistent with Hayek’s account of the production / relative price distortions of the credit cycle / artificial boom, as Hayek explains in an interview from 1978:
“Well, I think the general fact that booms have always appeared with a great increase of investment, a large part of which proved to be erroneous, mistaken. That, of course, fits in with the idea that a supply of capital was made apparent which wasn’t actually existing. The whole combination of a stimulus to invest on a large scale followed by a period of acute scarcity of capital fits into this idea that there has been a misdirection due to monetary influences….
http://hayekcenter.org/?p=3131
AFY!!theheelotsheepdog!!!
I have been trying to find guest writers for my blog so if you ever decide that’s something you are interested in please feel free to contact me. I will be back to look at out more of your articles later!