How I wish that Ben Bernanke would get caught emailing photos of his underwear-clad groin. Otherwise we don't stand a chance of reversing this administration's economic policy, which is shaping up to be every bit as disastrous as that of its predecessor.
Indeed, the Fed chairman's much anticipated remarks on Tuesday take one back to the contemptuous indifference of a Herbert Hoover to the public's suffering: Bernanke dismissed the wobbly economy with its anemic 1.8 percent first-quarter growth as merely "somewhat slower than expected." The rise in unemployment to 9.1 percent was "some loss of momentum."
The problem with Bernanke is that he is utterly clueless as to the stark pain and fear endured by the 50 million Americans who have experienced, or face the prospect of, losing their homes. His remarks reflected the insularity of a ruling-power elite that is magnificently impervious to the damage that Bernanke's policies in the current and past administration helped inflict on what used to be called the American way of life. This is a man who assured us there was no housing crisis, while his policies at the Fed encouraged the mortgage securitization swindles that caused the meltdown of the economy.
His full statement stands as a classic example of the limits of economic language as morally descriptive: "Overall, the economic recovery appears to be continuing at a moderate pace, albeit at a rate that is both uneven across sectors and frustratingly slow from the perspective of millions of unemployed and underemployed workers." Frustratingly slow -- how about going bat nuts with fear over not being able to make your mortgage payment and losing your home? Tell it to workers who must contend with stagnant wage rates and sharply rising gas and food costs as better jobs and therefore consumer demand move offshore. Bernanke takes low wages to be reassuring news on what he sees as the all-important inflation front: "subdued unit labor costs should remain a restraining influence on inflation."
At home we are experiencing a social tsunami with the disappearance of a middle-class workforce of stakeholders who were assumed by observers as varied as Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville to be the very bedrock of America's experiment in freedom. Many with jobs are struggling desperately to get by as the average workweek and pay scales fall, and countless workers find themselves settling for rewards well below their skill sets. Even those slim pickings are denied to the unemployed. Bernanke concedes: "Particularly concerning is the very high level of long-term unemployment -- nearly half of the unemployed have been jobless for more than six months."
The jobs that have been created by our large multinational corporations, like the bailed-out GE, are primarily outside of the country, as Bernanke admitted: "Many U.S. firms, notably in manufacturing but also in services, have benefited from the strong growth of demand in foreign markets." Those foreign gains, fueled by far more successful anti-recession policies in China, Brazil and Germany, have driven up demand and prices abroad in the areas of petroleum, food and key construction commodities.
Bernanke, speaking at a monetary conference in Atlanta, conceded that "the depressed state of housing in the United States is a big reason that the current recovery is less vigorous than we would like," and that the "U.S. economy is recovering from both the worst financial crisis and the most severe housing bust since the Great Depression."
But he offered not a word as to how the severe effects of that housing bust might be mitigated. Not a word about assisting people to stay in their homes. Yet he claimed that the relief that the Fed provided to the bankers by buying up more than $1.2 trillion of the toxic mortgages those bankers had created "has been accomplished, I should note, at no net cost to the federal budget or to the U.S. taxpayer."
This is the Big Lie technique at work, employed by a huge banking lobby that stresses the direct cost of the TARP program while ignoring other programs that will not be paid back, as well as the additional cost of $5 trillion to the national debt that a proper Fed policy could have avoided.
The record is by now indelibly clear that the economic approaches pursued by George W. Bush and Barack Obama, with Bernanke playing a key role in both administrations, can be most accurately summarized as a policy of government of the bankers, by the bankers, and for the bankers.
Assurances of stability to the financial markets, meaning the ability for companies to borrow government funds at a near-zero interest rate without giving anything back to the public in the form of mortgage relief or job creation, have been the overwhelming goal. But even by that standard, as the latest statistics on job creation and construction starts attest, the government's effort is not working. Putting the bankers first has represented pushing on a string, what Paul Volcker condemns as a "liquidity trap," a situation in which taxpayer money has been made available to major corporations that invest in job creation that benefits foreigners instead of U.S. workers. Now that's an obscenity we should be concerned about.
Hmm..Lets tell people in 2010 the economy is getting real good, housing market decreasing every month since.
Hmmm.. 2011, we we dont know why the economy isnt getting better.
You want to know why? Take your economic degree and thorw it out, because you need a psychology degree. The rich do not want to spend money under this administration of uncertainty. They dont know whats going on, so they regulate it. The poor have no money to spend, and the middle class, have no money to spend and no jobs. So that leaves the rich to bail us out of this economic disaster. Well then Obama comes along and says the tax cuts are for the rich, this is for the rich, that is for the rich, well if you are rich, like me, would you feel comfortable spending money? We need the rich in this company, they provide jobs, they spend money, and we need them more now then ever.
by investors. The major holder of our debt is China, Japan comes in 2nd. They dictate policy.
They have us by ta tas , and their isn't much we can do.We would be better off, with a smaller
banks. This crises , has been on going , since Reagan opened up all the markets, and deregulate
all he could. The Globalization of the Economy, has made China the new economy of the future.
I'm with you but it's not gonna happen.
It's a little know fact but Bernanke eschews both boxers and briefs. The line spoken by Bill Murray's character in the movie Stripes has been Bernanke's go-to pick-up line for years:
"Chicks dig me because I rarely wear underwear."
policy all he wants (and has) but he can not create a WPA or a NRA.
For example, Obama understood international laws and called Israeli settlements in Palestine illegal. Then, he was ordered to pay for more of them, so we're paying.
So, how do smart people end up acting the same as the supposedly-dumb ones that preceeded them? And who's agenda are they enacting? Who has written the script?
Of course, the script writers are the same folks who finance the campaigns that get these folks elected. With all our silly public disclosure laws, it shouldn't be too hard to determine who owns Obama. So, pleased do something useful and check it out and then report it. If all these elected officials are nothing more than actors on the public stage, shouldn't we know who is writing the play? And who is directing?
Nothing new under the sun?
I think that most people would feel better about themselves if they were using their talents to produce useful, and much needed, public projects (schools, roads, bridges etc). Things that are needed and that right now are unaffordable by local agencies.
Put people to work, let them do something that they can be proud of, and give them cause to be proud of themselves again!
http://www.economist.com/node/18805615?story_id=18805615
We have not yet reached the goal but... we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.
Herbert Hoover
Franklin D. Roosvelt gave hope. He put people back to work.
If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
When you seen the productivity figures going up, what this is , in many cases ,
is less labor required to produce something.
Bernanke is pushing all of the levers available to him, including some in QE2 which are newly minted, to stimulate the economy and prevent the worse problem, delation. But the fact is that we have structural unemployment caused by concentration at the top and globalization. Broad measures cannot tackle structural problems.
I think Benanke has a lot of contempt for both parties in Congress for not attacking structural issues. He is just unable to cross a certain line in his public pronouncements.
Bernanke is deliberately degrading the dollar in order that the government may continue to finance its enormous historical debt levels. Bernanke works directly for the biggest banks in the world and not for the United States. The Fed is a privately run cartel with a core of 7 extremely large monolithic banks. The evisceration of the middle class is and has been an intentional policy. It reduces the country to a feudal empire, ships all jobs overseas, indentures citizens to banking rule and ballons profits for the top 1% who own and run the multinationals. This is all intentional, it is not coincidental. It is a broad based conspiracy by a traitorous elite class of criminals. Bernanke is merely a representative for them, a kind of dweeb-like and innocuous sounding con. The perfect foil really. And a traitor to the United States. Far more traitorous than Benedict Arnold yet far less dramatic or noticeable. Remember always that the business of theft on Wall Street has as its modus operandi two basic qualities. Obfuscation and tedium. They confuse you. They put you to sleep with their drab and droll pronoucements and endless idiocies. Then they steal you blind.
But hey, we should reelect him, right?
The baby boomer (I’m one of them) generation has helped destroy our country in no other way than their apathetic attention to what is really going on around us. Pathetic. We are they most selfish, historically uneducated group ever born in the USA. Well, except maybe those under forty now!