The U.S. unemployment rate has passed the psychological threshold of 10 percent for the first time since 1983, a couple of years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency when it reached 10.8 percent. It is also quite likely that it will go higher.

Economists say the unemployment rate could reach 10.5 percent next year because employers remain reluctant to hire.

October was the 22nd straight month the U.S. economy has shed jobs, the longest on records dating back 70 years.

Nearly 16 million people can’t find jobs even though the worst recession since the Great Depression has apparently ended. Persistently high unemployment could hurt the recovery by restraining consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy. That percentage is obviously much too high, as is the percentage of the economy held by the debt repackaging mills – read Wall Street and banks.

So, the news isn’t good despite some small rays of hope coming from the supposedly recovering automakers. The dollar continues to lose value, ostensibly to make U.S. products more attractive abroad, but in reality, because we continue printing money as if the national debt wasn’t an issue. The interest rates hovering at near zero percent might be attractive for certain borrowers, but totally counterproductive in the area of savings and secure and meaningful investments.

There seems to a slightly growing tendency to rebuild some of our former manufacturing might, following the example of Germany, which is a huge exporter, second only to China.

It would certainly be about time. After all, it has been a very long time, since we ceased to be a manufacturing giant, preferring to buy cheaper products elsewhere. It has also been a long time, since the importance of quality has been displaced by an ever-present quest to save 10 cents here and seven cents there.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Highest, Jobless, Rate, Reagan, Since, unemployment, US

Ronald Reagan and his Merrill Lynch Treasury Secretary Donald Regan

Reagan and Bush 41 quadrupled the national debt in only 12 years. Bush 43 doubled it again in only eight. It is now 10 times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected.

The hero of the conservatives, Ronald Reagan begun an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence. While the taxes on the super-rich went as high as 90 percent in the past – still leaving them more than enough for a lavish lifestyle – the so-called “trickle down Reaganomics” lowered those taxes by about two-thirds. The rhetoric of course emphasized the tax benefits for the average Americans, who were ostensibly the beneficiaries of those policies.

All of this, while the Regan administration kept preaching about “small government, free markets and democracy”.

Those who actually believed in the above Reagan TV commercial should be seriously surprised that the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980, rising for the first time in decades under Reagan and Bush 41, falling under Clinton and rising again under Bush 43.

Even though some people like to portray the Reagan legacy as an anti-communist success story, Reagan’s biggest legacy was the change in America’s financial rules.

Let’s start with the tax cuts for the rich, following with turning the federal retirement from a Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) to the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). The former was (and still is for some long-time federal employees), a pension system, based on years of service and FERS consists basically of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), a 401k setup, in which untold billions of federal worker’s retirement funds get largely invested in various Wall Street schemes every two weeks. It was in effect an enormous gift for the Wall Street apparatus, while depriving millions of government employees of a viable retirement option.

At the same time, the Reagan administration deprived the Americans of the ability to deduct interest payments for anything not directly related to their primary real estate holdings.

This of course has started the epidemic of rising household debt.

Lets not forget the super-costly S&L crisis, brought about by Reagan’s deregulation.

Lets not blame poor Ronnie for everything. After all, he only started the ball rolling, even though it was in a very big way. As you probably realize by now he was only the front for all of the shady financial “wizards”, who relentlessly continue their lobbying and machinations to the present time.

The next really big breakthrough in their efforts came with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 or CFMA (H.R. 5660 and S.3283), which in fact removed regulations of all kinds of financial crookery (called “products” by the industry) and which has returned the U.S. stock markets to the days before the 1907 Wall Street crash – in reality to legalized betting, which happens to be illegal outside of Wall Street. It was Bill Clinton, who towards the end of his second term signed this bill.

Let’s also not forget Enron and a whole bunch of other events, for which nobody has really gotten punished in any meaningful way.

Lets not forget Greenspan, Rubin, Summers and others, who continue to play important roles in our economy.

And don’t for a minute forget the fact that former and present Goldman Sachs executives are sprinkled throughout both the government and our financial system, continuing in their unrelenting mission.

Technorati Tags: bush, clinton, Economy, goldman sachs, greenspan, Reagan, reganomics, Rubin, summers, takeover, US, wall street

The first major announcement at the Pittsburgh G20 summit concerned the reorganization of the group. On Friday, major world leaders announced themselves as a new board of directors for the global economy, promising to overhaul loose financial regulations and to work harder to control dangerous imbalances that contributed to the financial meltdown.

President Obama and the other leaders declared that in the future, the meetings of the Group of 20 nations would be the primary way of coordinating global economic policy. The G20 will take over the job that had been done for decades by G8.

That’s all fine and not exactly unexpected, even though many of the countries not included among the wealthiest and most influential eight, or twenty have long been pressing to expand the G8 format and even to expand the G20 to include more members.

That’s the economic/organizational side of the summit so far. The more surprising development occurred later on Friday when Presidents Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Prime Minister Gordon Brown have together condemned the “discovery” of another Iranian nuclear enrichment facility.

The crux here is that Iran actually officially informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the existence of the underground facility on Monday and the U.S., French and British intelligence agencies have known about it for several years. It would be pretty hard therefore to call the facility exactly “secret” at this point.

Quite quickly Iran’s President has canceled a previously announced press conference in view of the “Big Three” statement on its nuclear program. It appears therefore that the move has succeeded in its probable goal of preempting any announcements on the subject by Iran.

In any case, both the “discovery” and the official condemnation by Obama, Brown and Sarkozy should make the upcoming meeting of Iran with six world powers quite interesting. We’ll be watching.

Technorati Tags: brown, Economy, G20, iran, nuclear, obama, Sarkozy, summit

The answer is rather simple and concise:  Not even close.

We realize that the U.S., along with most of the countries of the world is struggling with the after effects of getting the worldwide finances looted during the past 25, or so years. We are still trying to dig ourselves out from under Alan Greenspan’s legacy at the Federal Reserve and the incredibly dumb and in fact criminal lack of oversight of Wall Street and the banks.

We also realize that the present administration has not started both of the “elective” wars that we are now waging overseas, and that it hasn’t arrested the hundreds of more, or less, or not at all guilty terrorism suspects, still languishing in the Guantanamo prison among other places.

The point is that despite earlier promises, we still have as many soldiers in Iraq, as we did under Bush and that we have increased our deployment in Afghanistan. Also, nobody seems to want any of the Guantanamo prisoners. We don’t believe there should be any discussion in the matter and that the solution to that particular dilemma is rather simple: send the long-suffering and often innocent prisoners to live in and get the titles to the houses and the properties of the neocons and send the latter to Guantanamo, along with many of the bankers and Wall Street thieves.

What? You don’t like that idea? What could possibly be more just under the circumstances? Building a long stretch of gallows on the National Mall?

Getting back to the financial issues. There is no doubt that the first huge bailouts, or whatever the heck they call the multi-billion-dollar giveaways started at the end of the Bush 43 presidency. Most of the money asked for and given to AIG and other financial conglomerates by Hank Paulson – a well-known Walls Street insider – is still unaccounted for. The question is why did the Obama administration hire guys like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, who along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan were an integral part of the plan to loot our treasury and allow the bankers and Wall Street to run roughshod over everybody else? These are the very same guys who allowed the so-called Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 to pass at the end of Clinton’s presidency. Despite earlier moves, the most obvious of which was the actual founding of the Federal Reserve and the subsequent loosening of the regulatory reins by the George W. Bush people, the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 was the most serious and glaring act committed against our financial well being.

Now that with the addition of Al Franken the Democrats have finally achieved the coveted filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, can we really expect some long-awaited and long-overdue reforms to get enacted? Don’t hold your breath. The thousands of lobbyists, representing all kinds of special interests are swarming all over Capitol Hill, often dwarfing our elected representatives and their staffs, not only by sheer numbers, but also with money, favors and special deals. After all, we are not only talking about reforming health care, or enacting a truly meaningful climate legislation, but also about the main event, which is really a fight about preserving and if possible increasing corporate profits. And that of course is the real name of the game, as it always has been.

It doesn’t really matter that the majority of Americans want a public health plan in addition to the private ones and that most are truly concerned about the state of the environment. Most politicians do not really represent the rank and file citizens, or the country at large, but rather corporate interests. The situation is no different in the case of many government agencies, which despite popular perception are less concerned with protecting our interests, health and safety, but largely act in the corporate interest.

Going back to the Federal Reserve, which has failed abominably, particularly in the last 25 years to perform its main and most important mission, namely, to protect the public against the banking system. Just as in the case of the other agencies, unfortunately one cannot expect the Fed to fulfill its officially stated mission, if it is in reality a front for the banking industry. In fact, according to many experts, the Federal Reserve was the principal cause of the financial disaster that we have experienced and giving it even more oversight power seems by far more dangerous and foolhardy than playing Russian roulette. Doing so is simply another example of rewarding failure, just as the government has rewarded the banks with the bailouts for their failure.

It is therefore regrettable that President Obama has gone along with the advice of his flock of financial advisers and although we hope that by some as yet unknown miracle things will work out somehow, many feel that the president, along with the rest of the country may actually have cause to regret taking that road.

The economic recovery will not happen any time soon, despite the predictions of forecasters in the government and other places. What the financial “gurus” are touting is a recovery, but the bailouts will not really create that at all and the economy is not going to magically spring back to life as they keep telling us. They are simply propping up the industry, which has actually caused the disaster.

The drop in employment, productivity, wages and consumption might slow down a bit, but it is going to be a long time, before the economy actually recovers. And it is probably the hope of the industry insiders that by that time the public might actually be fooled into believing that the trillions of dollars doled out to the financial industry had the desired effect, when in fact it is simply another chapter in the unprecedented looting of our national financial resources.

In other words, it appears that the Democrats are just as proficient at looting the U.S. treasury as the Republicans, but that is frankly no surprise at all.

Technorati Tags: Bailouts, banks, democrats, Economy, federal reserve, greenspan, looting, majority, republicans, summers, wall street

Lets not forget that from the very beginning, starting with the Inaugural Address, the president promised an ambitious agenda, saying among other things: “Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.  They are serious and many.  They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.  But know this America, they will be met”.

His first and greatest challenge and priority was as expected the totally messed up economy, which despite all kinds of broadsides and criticism from the right, he certainly inherited from his predecessor.

In the present economic malaise Mr. Obama’s performance and achievements are being compared at every step with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s performance at the height of the Great Depression, starting with his inauguration in 1933. It took FDR years and the huge war effort during World War II to actually bring the U.S. economy from the brink of disaster, to being the most powerful entity in the world. President Obama is aiming for a much quicker turnaround. The multi-trillion-dollar “stimulus” and the earlier “bailout” expenditures prove how seriously the present administration is taking its role in this crisis.

Fortunately, not all of the taxpayer’s billions are being channeled to Wall Street and the banks – the real culprits in this economic mess. A good chunk of it has been earmarked for long-overdue health care and education reforms, with the former being considerably more costly. Repairing the U.S. transportation infrastructure – including finally a serious study of developing a fast rail network, which practically every developed country in the world already possesses and fixing and stabilizing the thousands of crumbling highway bridges and overpasses, as well as developing a “smart” energy grid and seriously investing in alternative sources of energy.

Those issues, along with lifting of the restrictions on cell stem research, the decision to close the extraterritorial prison in Guantanamo, banning torture, reversing some of the provisions of the Patriot Act and setting the withdrawal date from Iraq are definitely and without a doubt big achievements in their own right. It in fact appears that Barack Obama has already accomplished more in his first 50 days than George W. Bush in his entire eight years in power.

Why is it then, that some either uninformed, or simply envious members of what the British call “the loyal opposition” are being disloyal? Wouldn’t you call statements such as “I hope he fails”, or placing obstacles to the president’s agenda at every turn as disloyal behavior? Not just disloyal to the president, because that is not really required of the opposition, but disloyal to the country. After all, most of the problems the Obamistas are dealing with didn’t arise overnight, but have been with us for many decades now. They do require fixing, or at least improving not so much for the good of the White House, as for the good of the country at large.

Nobody is asking the “loyal opposition” to rubber-stamp everything, the way things were done in Congress under Bush. Dissent and divergent opinions are not only welcome, but also needed, but just because the members of the opposition feel that they have lost their grasp on power (which is more than true), doesn’t mean that they have to behave like spoiled brats.

So, get over it “loyal oppositionists”. You have been trounced in the election and for a very good reason. Now it is time for you to actually get to work fixing what you have screwed up, instead of going out on junkets paid for by the K Street lobbyists.

Like it, or not, President Obama gets a strong B+, or maybe even an A- from us for his first 50 days in office. The less than perfect score is mainly, but not solely awarded for his continued push to continue the war in Afghanistan.

Haven’t any of his advisers told the president that nobody has ever won a war over there?

Go check your history books. Alexander the Great managed to conquer the then smallish country and establish a Greek rule over there, but only for a time. The British were totally routed  in the 19^th century and we all know how the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has ended. Things don’t look any different now. It is definitely time to change the Pakistan/Afghan policy, since the present one obviously isn’t working.

Technorati Tags: agenda, ambitious, crisis, Economy, obama, opposition, politics, republicans