Call it what you will but I have developed the habit of reading while I, er, ‘dine’ (such as it is…) Well, this morning I picked up Saturday’s editorial section of the Local Rag (which I have stated many times before, is notoriously ‘conservative’ in its slant.)
And BOY do those guys have a head full of snakes!
I won’t go into the article because it read like a ‘talking points memo’ of Republican ‘justifications’ for not serving the public/doing their job as elected representatives of the people…(apparently not the people of THIS planet!)
I just want to point out that these people are NECESSARY to our oligarch’s control of the government. They get to play the ‘goat’ (and apparently they don’t mind…go figure?)
Um, the ‘former’ editor of the paper penned the article in question. You know what they say, only the good die young…well this prick is pushing 90…case closed!
Anyway.
I feel the need to return to a topic we haven’t visited in a while because there is very little chance that we will see anything along these lines coming from the people who blithely mis-manage our affairs…
As coincidence would have it, another blogger posted an article that is related to tonight’s topic
Without further adieu:
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Bernanke as Greenspan
What is Mr. Bernanke doing with QE2 (quantitative easing part two)? By his own admission, he is unleashing a flood of money into the system in order to forestall deflation. And how is more (fiat) money going to help the so-called "real economy"? Again by his own admission, by pumping up asset prices (i.e. stocks), creating a wealth effect and thus giving birth to a virtuous cycle of confidence, consumption and investment.
Here's an excerpt from the link above, an op-ed Mr. Bernanke wrote for the Washington Post a few days ago. [Go to the original article to find the link]
"And higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending. Increased spending will lead to higher incomes and profits that, in a virtuous circle, will further support economic expansion."
That's an astonishing statement of intent, coming as it does from the Federal Reserve, but let's accept it at face value (but, really, could you ever imagine that a head of the nation's central bank would act as a stock jobber for the S&P 500?).
Still, is Mr. Bernanke's asset-bubble strategy any different from what Mr. Greenspan did following the dot.com whump-and-dump of 2000-02? Oh, not really - except that Uncle Alan chose housing and crappy mortgages, while Brother Ben's choices are shares and Treasuries. I guess the former was burned by his correct but ill-timed Irrational Exuberance comment (and in markets timing is, after all, everything), whilst the latter has no such inhibitions. Yet.
What can I say...? Does it matter what you drink, if you end up face down in the gutter in an incoherent alcoholic stupor?
One more time: what we need, and what needs to be seriously targeted by all concerned, is higher earned income (wages and salaries), not more debt-inflated asset prices.
Period.
Yes good citizen, what we need are consumers with ‘more disposable income’.
But like the ‘chicken or the egg’ puzzle, do we actually need more ‘consumer driven growth’ or do we need to do a better job distributing the necessities of life?
As I have stated ‘ad nauseum’ (even I’m getting sick of saying it) we do not have a commerce system that puts the public welfare ahead of the welfare of the owners of commerce.
Worse good citizen, the ‘edge’ we concede to those owners has, for far too long, been in disproportionate excess to their (feeble) contributions to society.
We are long overdue to ‘revoke their charters’.
They are in flagrant violation of the conditions established at their founding.
But you get slick lawyers and judges that are blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other and, as you know, ‘shit happens’…
Here’s an old chestnut for you that you haven’t read in a while: Without Equality there can be no Justice and without Justice there can be no Peace.
It goes without saying that without Peace there can be no Prosperity…it’s all one big chain.
So what we’re really seeking is ‘Justice’.
I think 230 years has proven that we can’t produce Justice from the ballot box. (By letting others decide what the laws will be without ever consulting us…)
Fuck the greedy! The rest of us would be satisfied with our ‘fair share’.
Hell, most of us would be ‘living large’ if we were provided with ‘access’ to the things we have been ‘priced out of’.
Your ‘standard of living’ would improve dramatically if we ‘re-arranged’ how things got done.
Imagine ‘free’ healthcare.
The ‘nothing go up top’ crowd can’t but that’s because they think money is…real, that it is a ‘storehouse of value’ when nothing could be further from the truth!
Money has but ONE useful purpose to society. Do you know what that ‘one useful purpose’ is?
Didn’t think so.
It is a ‘regulator’; it serves to regulate access to scarce/perishable goods or services.
But that’s not how money ‘behaves’ here in capitalist utopia, does it?
No, capitalist utopia is built on ‘income streams’; it’s why lottery winners are bankruptcies waiting to happen while the rich remain rich!
We would need some minor but rather extensive overhauling of our commercial processing system to facilitate the conversion from profits for the owners to ‘profit for humanity’.
Remember good citizen, at the end of the day ALL money is ‘funny’.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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