2010,s Last Political Cartoons

 

…ended on a somewhat dreary outlook for 2011, to say the least.  Have a look for yourself.

Copyright © 2010 Universal Press Syndicate

Copyright © 2010 Universal Press Syndicate

Cagle Cartoons

Copyright © 2010 Creators Syndicate

 

Technorati Tags: Politics,Political Humor,Snark,2010,2011

An Hourly Workers State Of The Union…

…and this one is going to be a hell raising rant at our corporations, the Republicans, the Democrats, President Obama in particular.

   First off, the hourly worker here in Florida took a beating in this state. The Tampa area was certainly one of the worst hit as far as the economy goes. Jobs? Decent pay? Decent health insurance? There is no such thing in this area of the country. No is no such thing in the rest of the country for that matter.

  Upon moving back to this state, I become one of those under paid workers with no type of health insurance. I am a type-1 diabetic,so I started off on the wrong foot right out of the gate. In January of 2010, I spent 4 hours in an the emergency room of one of the local hospitals because of my diabetes and that trip cost me $3,600 for an I.V. with water in it for minor dehydration, and two visits from some foreign doctor who spent a total of 20 minutes with me. This all came out of my pocket in a few monthly installments. A big expense for someone who is making the minimum wage and only working 30 hours a week at the time. It’s a damned good thing that I was very smart with my money back when I was working for real pay and benefits or I would be sleeping out in the streets permanently. Yes, I’ve been homeless a time or two since being here because I prefer to live off of my work earnings. Those earnings have not always met my bills. For better than half of 2010, they did not meet any of my needs and I did have to go on  the food-stamp program.

   At almost the mid-point of the year, work pretty much came to a grinding halt. 30 hours per week up to that point was bad enough, but the hours took a major hit dropping down to as few as only 4 hours of work per week. In a good week I might even luck out and get 16 hours of work!  I do the public transportation thing here so that cost me $3.75 per day for an all day bus pass. I did manage to buy a few monthly passes which set me back $60 a shot. Some of those turned out to be a waste because I used them up going to a local temp agency which had nothing even remotely resembling a job.

  Now let’s take an even closer look at my expenses.

  My rent runs only $400 per month, which isn’t to bad. The electric bill is in the area of $70 a month. I do have cable TV and the net of course, which runs at $85 and some change. I’m a smoker so that cost a little bit more. I do not party and go out wasting money even when I’ve had the cash to waste, so no expenses there.

  Now comes the really hard part, my insulin. This cost me $107 per vial every 28 days or so. Then there are the syringes which I need in order to take the meds. One 10-pack of those run $3.50 and I buy at least 4 or 5 packs a month since I have to shoot-up 2 times a day, sometimes 3.

   My estimates tell me that I made only $8,000 for all of 2010, so you can easily figure out that life has been a lemon this year. Can I get a refund?

  The employment situation here in Florida is not going to get better in 2011. It may drop a little bit,but the latest stats (November) say that the state has some 1,110,000 jobless out of a work force of 9,237,000. that is a 12.0 percent unemployment rate. You can blame this shit right square on that last piece of crap President who sat in the White house with his goons and robbed this country (economy) blind. And, in case you missed it over the past 2 years, President Barack Obama and his boys have been doing the same thing. This man, along with backing by those blue-dog Democrats and the Republican Party, have stripped you and I of any hope of financial security in the near future, if ever.

  Now,let us go to the next part of our economic problem,shall we? Much of the blame for our woes is not due to just the banking industry and Wall Street,or to the corporations who fuck you and I on a daily basis. From where I sit, the largest blame is placed on the voters in this country. I’m pointing fingers at you dumb,ignorant fucks who sit at home watching shit like the FoxNews Channel and who do not have enough mind to actually check that so-called news out to see if it is factual. That propaganda network knows all to well that the majority of its viewers are flat out plain stupid so they feed you that phony conservative line of bullshit that their Republican master tell them to,know to damned well that you will not question authority. 

  Many of you voted for more of the same Bush policies which got you and I into this mess in the first place! Are you stuck on stupid? Maybe you should consider one of those memory courses that help your memory for turning to shit because many of you most certainly are suffering from a short term memory loss.

    I’m not all to pleased with the way in which Obama has bent over backward to help give the Republicans and big business anything that their little hearts desired,but in the same token, the man cannot do a whole hell of a lot when the Republicans, and many Democrats, have done everything possible to keep the man from doing what this country sorely needs done.

   I hope that you have enjoyed 2010 folks because 2011 is going to make 2010 look real good to you when it is all over. Those Republican asshats that you elected will make sure of that.                  (continued)

Technorati Tags: New Years,Politics,Barack Obama,Republicans,Democrats,State of the Union,Employment,Jobs,News,Current Events,The Economy

 

  

 

The State Of The Union

 

    The following article is one persons idea of what the “state of the union” is,and I will follow on New Years Eve with what I think the “state of the union” is if you are an hourly worker in this country and you are continuing to lose ground in our economy.

DailyKos

The Real State of the Union, 2011

by miguelitoh2o         Thu Dec 30, 2010

We'll soon be hearing from President Obama on the State of the Union.  This is my analysis and opinion of the actual state of affairs in our country as the new year is dawning.

The Economy

Oil is at 90 dollars a barrel. The governments of Europe, Japan, and the United States are saturated with debt. Housing prices in the US are falling again, and there’s no job growth in America. For some reason, many are still imagining that we’re in an economic recovery.  Our economic system remains as fragile and dangerous as it ever was.  Meanwhile the perpetrators of the financial crisis are enjoying record profits.

We find ourselves bailing out not just American banks but large banks around the world.  The economies of scale in the financial sector continue to chip away at the sovereignty of not just ours, but all the nations of the world.  In fact, we had begun refinancing foreign banks as early as 2007, indicating that the Fed was aware of a crisis long before they had admitted. Giving those monies to foreign banks without so much as a press release or a demand for better trade agreements, it is clear that even with all those big geopolitical shifts we have been hearing so much about, the United States remains the world's sole Schmuck Superpower.  The good news?:  Of the money that was used in bailing out financial institutions, about half has been returned.

So, the economy limps along following its near collapse from risky investments by the banks following the deregulation of the banking industry during the past 28 years and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.  Rather than forcing banks with large deficit positions on their books to come clean as to their actual financial position as would have been done in any developing nation which was in financial crisis by the IMF, we’ve suspended "mark to market" accounting and have allowed these banks who put our entire financial system at risk in order to continue their activities without reducing their leverage positions. Banks don’t want to decrease their leverage positions as keeping their leverage high decreases their tax burden, and increases the implicit guarantee of their debt by the government.

Rather than dealing with these liquidity issues directly, we’ve opted to allow the banks to "earn" their way back to solvency by arbitraging interest rate spreads against the US government through low/no-interest rate loans.  This allows us to conceal what is essentially a bailout as a non-budget item.  The banks have continued to hold onto this money rather than infuse it into our staggering economy as they slowly build themselves back into solvency at our societal cost. As a senior bank official said to The New York Times in fall,  2008, "It doesn’t matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns."  Meanwhile the financial sector, which accounted for no more than 16% of our corporate profits between 1973 and 1985, accounted for 41% of the same this decade.  Executive compensation in finance out-performed this statistic, now accounting for 181% of the average executive compensation of all our industries combined.  In spite of decreasing contributions from corporations in sharing the nation’s tax burden,  our current wisdom dictates that we must not increase taxation on our corporations for fear of stalling any economic recovery. Employment taxes, by contrast—the regressive bit of the fiscal structure—are bearing a large and increasing share of the brunt.

Corporate tax as a percentage of all us tax revenue 1950-2009

These bankers precipitated the crisis with risky bets, implicitly guaranteed by the taxpayers, and they continue to use their influence to stymie attempts to regulate their industry.  They retain the advantage for themselves and investors at the public’s expense. The Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn’t.  This will remain unchanged unless the oligarchy of these powerful banks is broken, but with our elected officials relying on the political contributions from the financial sector, this will be an uphill battle.

When Teddy Roosevelt broke up the trusts he was focused on collusion and price fixing within industries, while today our primary concern is that one firm or a group of interconnected firms can bring down our whole economy.  The exponential math of debt by definition dictates that countries will only lose their wealth over time and become increasingly indebted to the global central banking network.

Employment

There has been job growth, but it’s apparently only in part-time jobs.  Our official measurements of unemployment were changed in the 1990s to reflect less negatively on the ruling oligarchy. While real unemployment approaches rates not seen since the 1930s.

Our Legal System

The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people and have the same rights to free speech as people, while the Lower courts are finding that the laws don’t apply equally to corporations as they would to individuals by ignoring the letter of the law in foreclosure actions in favor of the banks.  Unless we find our District Courts of Appeal willing to stand up, will we find our laws being subverted by a Supreme Court all too willing to once again defend the rights of corporations at the expense of ordinary citizens.  Prominent economists have warned that unless changes are made to our mortgage policies, another financial crisis awaits us.

The Free Press

It no longer exists.

National Security/Defense

Fear will continue to trump reason in our national security decisions.

Why bother with the terrorists?  National security is now distilled down to its core mission of protecting corporate intellectual property, and Homeland Security has carried out a court-approved seizure "against 82 domain names of commercial websites engaged in the illegal sale and distribution of counterfeit goods and copyrighted works."

And if we can’t defeat our enemies on the merits of the charges, we’ll get them for alleged sex crimes.

Shoppers at Walmart will soon have something other than glossy magazines and chewing gum to look at when in the checkout line: A "video message" from the Department of Homeland Security asking them to look out for "suspicious" activity and report it immediately.  Would you like some Big Brother with your chicken salad?

We continue to wage an expensive war and build permanent bases in Iraq to secure access to oil, while our ally Saudi Arabia remains the biggest funder of terrorism.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan we continue to try and build coalitions by destroying homes and businesses, as we expand the war into Pakistan.

Job opportunities and defense are now critically linked as the U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.

The Environment

The dispersants used in the Deepwater horizon oil spill are increasing contamination in the gulf, but like our political paradigm, having fallen down the rabbit hole perception is king while reality takes a back seat.

The Deficit

The myth of free markets as our best approach to allocating resources has been discredited if not disproved; yet the financial orthodoxy hasn’t acknowledged the fact.  Like medieval bloodletters, the oligarchy prescribes austerity for the taxpayers, while promoting subsidies for their own industries.    Creating hysteria about debt, allows these captains of industry to advance their agenda of gutting social programs while perversely advocating low taxes for the rich.   Likewise the oligopoly seeks to preserve its control of the financial, healthcare, and defense sectors, which could individually or collectively solve all our deficit problems if the government would find the political will to regulate them.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has calculated that the extended Bush-era tax cuts will contribute by far the largest share to the next decade’s deficits — ahead of the recession’s drain on tax revenues, Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, TARP and Obama’s stimulus.   Again, the many must suffer so that the few may prosper.  Meanwhile we’ve succeeded in attaining record levels of poverty among families with wages.  The axiom, "the business of America is business" has never been more true, and we taxpayers must look to our mighty GDP as our sole consolation as we queue up in soup lines.

President Obama will continue to advance his conservative agenda by cynically freezing federal employee pay, which even if he could reduce payroll costs by 50% would only affect the deficit by 3%.  Oh, and the deficit commission recommendations would kill and additional 4 million jobs in an analysis done by the Economic Policy Institute.

States and Local Government

All 50 states now find themselves in worse shape than Ireland with respect to their debt/GDP ratio.

Many municipalities are considering or have all ready sold or leased their water systems to private enterprise to meet budgetary shortfalls.   The sale/privatization  of public assets will be continue to be the oligarchy’s first choice for balancing budgets, as the reins of sovereignty are abdicated inexorably to Capitalism.

Politics

The President continues to play 3-dimensional chess by alienating his own party, including Democratic conservatives, while courting Republican opposition.

In the end, the appearance of a political opposition is the essential window dressing required to fool people into thinking that there's actually more than one side that will be heard on any public issue. There isn't. The ultimate winners are the great accumulations of wealth represented by that bipartisan coalition that has no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests – The Money Party.  The enemies of greatness and progress are the politicians and their patrons who insist on having their way on every issue, who take every thing that isn't nailed down; and, who create fake dramas and diversions to further the distortions and censorship of the corporate media.

That’s the real state of the Union.  Happy New Year to us.

Writer's note:  In an effort to make this read as an actual public address, I've not identified certain passages as quotes, which some of this essay certainly is.  I've attempted to identify the sources of these quotes in the embedded links.

Cross-posted at http://dagblog.com/...

 

Technorati Tags: State Of The Union,Thrid World America,The Economy,News

All Those Jobs Are Going Overseas…

   ….and you can bet your ass that that is not going to change in our lifetimes!

Original Article

All those jobs going overseas.

by Steve Love      Wed Dec 29, 2010

("Companies are hiring – overseas"  Dallas Morning News 12/29/2010)

      Item #1:  Caterpillar hires as many people overseas as it does in the U.S.  Why? Because there is a massive building boom overseas that has a demand for the earthmoving machines Caterpillar makes.  There is nothing in the U.S. comparable to the apartment, highway and railway construction going on in China.

     Item #2:  "There is a huge difference between what is good for American companies vs. what is good for the American economy," says Robert Scott, spokesman for the Economic Policy Institute.   Why?  The down-side of the dollar being the dominant international currency is that a dollar earned anywhere in the world is as valuable as one earned in the United States.  So U.S. companies take their business to where they can make the most dollars and that is no longer in the United States.
     Item #3:  "Companies will go where there are fast-growing markets and big profits," says Jeffery Sachs, economist, Columbia University.   Where are those fast-growing markets?  Where the middle class is growing.  Why there?  Because that is where there is disposable income and high demand for consumer goods.    And where is the middle class growing?  "By 2015, the middle class in Asia will be as large as that in Europe and North America," the article goes on to say.  This is the hand-writing on the wall that we need to be reading!
     And about those "big profits?"   Where are they?  Certainly not where "Everyday low prices" is the gospel of business.   Big profits do not take place where the margin between the fixed cost of an item and the selling price is constantly shrinking.    Wal-Mart is profitable, not because it makes a reasonable profit on every item it sells but because it makes a minimal profit on massive numbers of items sold...a great model for a few mass-marketers but a formula for "little or no profits" for everyone else.   Small businesses cannot operate on a Wal-Mart business model...as is clear across this country as hundreds of thousands of small business have tried to compete with Wal-Mart and failed.  
     Small businesses thrived in the post-WWII era precisely because there was a reasonable margin between fixed costs and price and, most importantly, there was a middle class being formed receiving wages high enough that a couple of dollar cheaper was not sufficient motivation to change buying habits...something we have not seen in the United States since wages began stagnating three decades ago.    
     Item #4:  "China just became the world’s second-largest economy," says David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s, who goes on to report that half of the S&P’s revenue now comes from overseas.   Which is just another way to say that Wall Street does not just share Manhattan Island with the United Nations - it shares its place in the world as an international institution.
     So, what do we know?  Beginning in the late 20th Century, there appears to have been set in motion a process by which the U.S. economy has been made further and further irrelevant.   The dollar is still the currency of the world however, when it comes to being the producers of goods the world wants to buy or being the creative center for innovations, no one is looking to the United States anymore.    The days of an American-centric world economy are gone.
     What passes for a domestic economy is one gigantic system designed to transfer what wealth the middle class still has, after three decades of stagnate wages and a lowering standard of living, to the moneyed elite: the 0.01% of the population who control the lion share of the nation’s wealth.   And when that transfer is complete we will join the other banana republics of the world.
     Or then, we shall become, as England became after all its colonies went their separate ways, a nation of shop-keepers, unless....unless we have the political leadership to challenge almost every element of what is accepted as economic common wisdom, and focuses like a laser on rebuilding the middle class by setting the nation on a course of nothing less than a complete reshaping of the American economy and modernization of its infrastructure.

Technorati Tags: Robert Scott,Economic Policy Institute,Jobs,United States,Employment,Current Events,Wealth