The last Sunday in August? Already? Fall will be upon us before we know it. And all you east coasters, stay safe. Not a cloud in the sky here in Los Angeles. To the links!
- In case you missed it, Rick Perry has doubled down on his assertion that social security is a ponzi scheme:
Earlier that day at the The Vine Coffeehouse, Perry told a voter that Social Security was ?ponzi scheme for these young people.?
?The idea that they?re working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie,? he said. ?It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can?t do that to them.?
Does he expect to win seniors with that mouth?
- For all you "football" fans out there: Manchester 13, London 3.
- How Rick Perry created Texas massive budget crisis. So much for the Texas economic miracle.
- Wait, did I mention that Rick Perry is a flip-flopper? After angering social conservatives not too long ago by declaring that same-sex marriage was an issue for states to decide owing to his belief in the Tenth Amendment, Perry has now reversed himself by signing NOM's pledge to oppose same-sex marriage everywhere. And you thought Mitt Romney had a hard time finding consistency.
- The most important paragraph you will ever read about the European "government debt" cirisis:
The European sovereign debt crisis is little more than a huge ?bait and switch? perpetrated on the publics of Europe, by their governments, on behalf of their banks. We need to remember that what we refer to today as the ?European Sovereign Debt Crisis? began as a private sector financial crisis back in 2008, when ?too big to fail banks,? writing deep out of the money options on taxpayers, quite unexpectedly (to some) blew up. Fearing a financial Armageddon, governments transformed private bank debt into public debt via bailouts, lost revenues, lower growth, higher transfers, and yawning deficits. The unavoidable result across the European continent was a massive increase in government debt. While painting this as a story of fiscal irresponsibility has some plausibility in the Greek case, it simply isn?t true for anyone else. The Irish and the Spanish, I and S in the eponymous ?PIGS? were, for example, considered ?best in neoliberal class? in terms of debts and deficits until the crisis hit. Public debt is a consequence of the financial crisis, not its cause.
And as David Atkins at digby's place writes, that leaves European nations with two choices:
But as the financial sector continues to careen further and further out of control worldwide, the challenge faced by sovereigns worldwide is this: either become subservient entities to the global financial institutions that truly govern the fates of the world's citizens, or reassert their authority and independence while allowing reckless banking institutions to fail.
Most nations are choosing the former, both because they lack the courage to do the latter, and because they lack the vision to imagine what kind of system might need to be created in a post-too-big-to-fail world. The world's economies are now massively interdependent, with most of those interdependencies lubricated by liquidity provided by the big banks.
And that is a ticket to global social malaise.
- Final thought: if Ron Paul were President, there would be no FEMA. If Eric Cantor were president, there might still be a FEMA, but you'd have to stop funding your kid's school to repair the hurricane damage. Makes me wonder how on earth the Republican Party is still a viable political entity in this country.
Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/UZYMxjU9L4o/-Midday-open-thread
No comments:
Post a Comment