It is because someone keeps deleting my posts.
I have them backed up on a word file for now.
Will keep re-doing them til the cows come home.
Anyone know why this is happening?

Sorry to burst that bubble there sixstrings!
Should I get banned, for whatever reason, I have about
a dozen different IP addresses I can use. And an equal number of e-mail accounts.
So I'll be back, one way or another.
BTW, one we all know and love is here under a different name and IP address.
I know it!
Do you?
Now wheres them pigmen?

Last edited by VZR1800 on Fri Jul 03, 2009 4:56 am, edited 2 times in total.

Yesterday.

No Sh-t.

That's what really scares me about the future of this country, even if peak oil never materializes as a problem.

Americans are being made to compete with the ENTIRE FREAKING WORLD. Well, problem is, most of the world will work for peanuts! Healthcare will continue to be a growing field, thanks to baby boomers.. but like the manufacturing and IT jobs, more and more the jobs in these growth areas are being filled by foreigners.

Its almost as if there is some larger plan at work, the goal of which is to grind the American people down into the oblivion of equality with the world's poor.

And the second point of yours I bolded is the most sobering reality dawning on folks.. that these lost jobs, in fact, are NEVER going to be repalced.

Let the game of musical chairs commence.

Depends on which group of "American People" you're talking about.

The highly educated, highly skilled, technologically savvy among us are thriving. Well, not necessarily thriving but they are certainly doing better than the people mentioned in your article.

Granted, they would have done well in any environment but they are particularly adept at taking advantage of the opportunities available to a globalized economy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/meltdown-geography

That article is a great summary of the likely outcome of all of this mess.

It's not that the working class has become much poorer over the past quarter century. The real standard of living for most of them has probably been roughly flat, maybe a small improvement.

It's the standard of living of the top 10% that has jumped ahead of everyone else.

The dramatic growth of those at the top has pushed inequality up substantially and is threatening the sustainability of the force that lead to that growth (aka, Globalization).

For ordinary folks living in ordinary places like Toledo, Ohio. Globalization sucks.

For ordinary folks living in extraordinary places like London or Manhattan, Globalization is net positive, but not necessarily by much.

For the extraordinary among us, Globalization is like an all you can eat buffet of prosperity.

(I claim to be a member of neither group)

The question is, will the ordinary allow the extraordinary to continue to reap most of the benefits of Globalization or will a class conflict ensue? Moreover, not to turn this into yet another political thread, does the election of President Obama and a solidly Democratic Congress represent the opening salvo of this class conflict?

I respectfully note that I believe that your perspective is fatally skewed.

This is the way I look at . . .

Round about 1900 it became completely clear that the industrial revolution was going to cause a major shake out in the world. In a nutshell, those with access to resources who could bring those resources to bear quickly were able to, essentially, be the first ones in on the great transmogrification of fossil fuels to money. Specifically, oil to money.

Modern economy is really not much more than a complex system whereby people are employed to turn oil into products.

From 1920 through about 1970 the U.S. was the major oil producer in the world, and that, combined with vast amounts of other natural resources, resulted in a concentration of wealth in the United States.

For the last 40 years, momentum has kept the U.S. on top.

Now, however, it is becoming quite obvious that the oil wealth and vast natural resources of the U.S. have been mostly already converted to product.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us with greatly diminished natural resources and a standard of living that better represents 1970 than 2009. Borrowing, asset inflation, and the credit bubble have all been employed to keep the standard of living speciously high.

But the momentum is gone and the borrowing, asset inflation, and credit bubble have nothing left to give.

America's wealth was one derived from resources - namely oil.

We have, to date, been fairly successful at buying the needed resources from other countries to fill the gap we created in our own resource pool.

That tactic, however, is becoming impoverishing in a world of shrinking resources.

This is why Iraq and Iran have been made to be the bad guys - they hold much of the remaining resource pool, and, quite obviously, as the resource pool shrinks, they become ever more powerful.

It's like a class of kids - a dozen or so kids start with a full sack of candy (KSA, Iraq, Iran, U.S., Canada, Venezuela, Russia, Kuwait). Some have small sacks (Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, Norway, Britain, China). Some have virtually empty sacks (Israel, South Africa, Poland).

The U.S. was able to pull out its candy first. It sold much of it to others (goods produced), shared some for free to make friends (Israel), bought a big stick with some of it (atomic arsenal), and so on. This early production allowed the U.S. to dominate the class room.

But, over time, the amount of candy the U.S. was able to pull out dropped substantially. The U.S., however, did not want to give up eating candy or being the star of the classroom. So the U.S. did various things to attempt to maintain its position - it bought more candy from other countries that had candy with the money it had already earned on past candy sales, it borrowed money to buy more candy, and it used its big stick to make sure that none of the other kids would try to use their candy against the U.S. (Iraq, Iran).

Unfortunately, there is not enough candy in the class room to keep feeding the U.S., which is now fat, slow, and with rotten teeth. The U.S. must rely more and more on its stick, because, running well short of candy, money, and credit, nothing much else is left to ensure that some of the other students can be compelled to give the U.S. some of their candy.

And if the other countries ever decide to stop selling their candy to the U.S., system shock will occur.

Fact is, we're not being "made to compete" with the world - we got in first, we hogged all the resources we could, and now, we less and less left to hog in ready reach of the long arm of the empire, we're starting to relapse. We're starting to move back to where we began, before the bags of candy were handed out. Unfortunately, relative to everybody else we are fat, out of shape, and in very bad condition, so the end of the candy in the sack will result in a very difficult period of time as we thin back up and become healthy again.

We will become what we once were - which was quite a beautiful thing indeed.

I just hope that we don't kill too many of our classmates in a sugar-deprived frenzy as we attempt to maintain our cheap carb intake as the candy runs out.

I am not in the workforce anymore but hear a lot of stories locally of workers being asked to donate time etc. to help preserve jobs. And taking vacation time to help cut inventories etc. Is this sort of thing going on in other places?

Its the debt. Its all come due.

Banks with toxic debt, businesses like GM deeply in debt, individuals owe on underwater mortgages, states like California can't manage their affairs and issue IOUs and the federal debt is exploding.

Millions of people, businesses, some states and the federal government are all basically bankrupt.


Look...theres a black swan.

And it's all Obama's fault

Gotta agree with Mr. Nobility here . . .

It's all about the debt.

America was going to come off it's post WWII high of cheap oil at some point.

What the debt did was allow us to push the day of reckoning forward 40 years.

Had we never taken the debt on, oun SOLs would have been much lower over the years and we would not be the "world power" we are today.

But, of course, the path down is now much steeper and deeper.

Everyone knows how one of the great millitary mistakes of WWII was the Anglo French generals failure to understand how it was not a re-run of WWI. IMHO the same mistake is being made about this recession depression. It is not a rerun of the great depression. I honestly think that some trade barriers to prevent a wage race to the bottom and some minimum wages both locally in for some international industries (like steel mills and car assembly) will help maintain a workforce that can purchase manufactured goods and prevent a very long term crisis of permentant over capacity in industries and cut throat wage cuts reducing the people who can buy what is being manufactured.

Its near heressy but its my deep held belief.

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... o/ch01.htm

I'm not quite seeing how any of the OP's bolded points makes this any different from other recessions we've had before.......

Knowing what we know about the Federal Reserve, being neither Federal or a reserve but a private banking cartel that loans money to the US government at interest, you suspect it was a poor response to have a steadily rising deficit?

Who knows when history is being rewritten everyday?

The New Deal built the New World Order
http://batr.org/gulag/081903.html
"When a nations fails to learn the true history of its past, the people are doomed to reside within a fairy tale of delusions. Once that deception becomes ingrained into the popular culture, the task of the tyrant simplifies...
...For citizens to look kindly upon Roosevelt and the mutated expansion patrimony of central planning, requires a total ignorance why the Revolution of 1776 was fought and the distrust and fears that founding patriots had towards an all powerful central government..."

Are these the same founding patriots who kept slaves? Once you compromise your values, they are dead.

THIS is what's different from past recessions:
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f295/Fishsurfer/JoblossPercentJune2009.jpg
(graphic comparing job losses in every recession post WWII)

So because the job losses are worse this time around suddenly makes it permenant? How about showing a graph that compares this to the great depression? Something we should consider was the enormous size of the credit bubble, which just means it will take more time to work itself out.

Dude, don't you get it? The jig is up.. no more easy credit to fund another consumer economy bubble. So, in our 70% consumer economy, where do you propose the jobs will come from? Green jobs? Good luck with that, those will be outsourced to Asia too.

EDIT: Now, assuming the best that Peak Oil and global warming aren't real, then you're correct that depression isn't "permanent." But it may as well be.. the Great Depression took what, 15 years to play out? Everyone says WWII ended the GD, but they forget that during the war years people still did without. No new cars, no hosiery for the ladies, strict ration coupons for all sorts of goods. People did without for so long that they had no choice but save their money, and that's what ended the GD -- years of sacrifice, saving, paying down debts.

Keep in mind that Roosevelt had absolute control over teh value of the dollar at that time, with the Fed in control of the number of dollars. It is the general opinion of most economists that the Fed did two major things wrong in the later 1930s, not helping finance the budget deficits enough and trying to drain free reserves from the banking system. The Fed also did not like Roosevelt's devaluation of the dollar, which caused commodity prices to increase 75% from there low in about 18 months.

While I do not think issuing new Fed money creates anything in the long run, the Fed's policies at times undermined Roosevelt's programs by making them harder to finance. The draining of free reserves is apparently a concept that Bernanke is against, so that he won't 'repeat the mistakes' of the 1930s. I do agree that the Fed too abruptly moved to make a major tightening at the first sign of economic recovery.

We had a financial bubble because credit was unusually easy, even if we went back to the same credit standards we had before credit deregulation, credit would still be available to people WHO DESERVED IT. When there are such major imbalances then recessions happen. This is part of capitalism.



I'm not a fortune teller, but unless we pull a japan and total frak things up I would reckon that jobs would from other, more efficient industries.

The impulse to deregulate an increasingly overcrowded market is also a function of capitalism.

I'm not saying all regulation is bad, but too much regulation strangles economies. There was more than enough proof of that in the Soviet Union.