Larry Summers Apologetics

Rescuing and Rebuilding the US Economy: A Progress Report by Lawrence H. Summers, Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy July 17, 2009 To read the recommended page: http://www.piie.com/events/event_detail.cfm?EventID=119
> Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics
> 1750 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
> Washington, DC 20036
> www.piie.com


This was a speach given by our treasury secretary Larry Summers. He was talking to a room of people and here they are for you to check outhttp://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Peterson_Institute_for_International_Economics

Perhaps this speach was meant to reassure a group of people who could sink the value of the dollar. And as I was reading this I thought of something Paul Krugman had published the day before "The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely."http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/opinion/17krugman.html?_r=1&em

Summers' speech, I am not sure whether to laugh or cry about it, Is he really that out of touch? "As of May, the tax cuts, fiscal support for state and local government, and family assistance programs in the Recovery Act have boosted disposable income by nearly two percent. This has supported household spending as families have begun the necessary repairing of their household balance sheets."

Now I have a response from Virginia department of social services on this please watch this video and tell me if families are getting assistance.

Poverty in Virginia Presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBY2ojUeZ5w

Creigh Deeds and an Election Promise

Creigh Deeds will be Dem candidate for Governor of Virginia, so I was looking him up and found this, its something important to me, if he becomes elected can we please push him to fulfill his election promise?

"He also vowed to use his executive power to push non-partisan redistricting, if elected Governor. Sen. Deeds is hoping to eliminate the time honored political tradition of Gerrymandering(haha time honored?)

"Government ultimately belongs to the people, not elected officials," said Senator Deeds. "Yet, our broken redistricting process allows for legislators to protect their own interests by drawing districts that protect incumbents and political majorities. When I’m Governor, Virginia voters will be the ones to choose their elected officials instead of allowing legislators to choose their voters." (powerful words let's hold him to it)http://nbc12.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/deeds-presents-redistricting-plan Highlights of Creigh's Victory Speechhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9SLiSRNWwE

Reading some about Gerrymandering, its VERY importanthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering


I am not telling you how to vote i am telling you that if this is important to him, it also happens to be something very important to me and I would love to see Gerrymandering GONE.

Thoughts On July 4th

let it go - the

smashed word broken

open vow or

the oath cracked length

wise - let it

go itwas sworn to

go

let them go - the

truthful liars and

the false fair friends

and the boths and

neithers - you must let them go they

were born

to go

let all go - the

big small middling

tall bigger really

the biggest and all

things - let all go

dear

so comes love

~ e. e. cummings ~

In June 2009, the Merrill Lynch Global Wealth Report concluded the number of millionaires in the US was 2.5 million people.1.In a nation of 306 million people, that's .8% unless you count the 13 to 15 million illegal immigrants, who also live work in the US. Certainly puts a new twist on that old talking point "1% pay 58% of all income tax." With one in 50 children homeless in the US, one has to wonder why they do not pay even more in if it is indeed true that one percent of all the people on Wall St. make ninety-nine percent of all the profits. 3.Such a tiny number of Americans benefit and thrive from the current way of doing things.

Our current federal bank/war economic model always will require a group of 'losers' to control inflation, that means minorities and women are first ones out even when things are going well, and today it is not. 2. I found this astounding and sad. Since our government can never directly offer services useful to us, in the name of preserving a 'capitalist' system, it instead stealthily manipulates the economy through 'defense' spending, (we are 5% of the world who spend 52% of the world's military spending) and industrial agriculture policies (monetization) that subsidize production and shipping beyond the loftiest dreams of any marxist.

Bizarre and disturbing are the cries from so many fellow citizens to deliver us from our current suffering by abandoning the enlightment ideals that founded the United States of America and relenqish democracy. "We are a republic, not a democracy," they say, quoting Pat Buchanan, (then what about the republics of China or Iraq under Sadam Hussein? Republic only means you have a president, it has nothing to do with balance of power) or, "once people are elected they can do whatever they want" These people are speaking in the interest of that 1% in a severe case of Stockholm syndrome, considering giving up their citizenship. Do not let yourself be distracted with race issues, or homosexual issues until we get to the root of the problem.

According to our senator Warner, The Federal Reserve's primary responsibility is to conduct monetary policy to achieve twin objectives: price stability and full employment. 4.Just in case you were not aware of the relationship between employment rate and inflation I think this author below offered an excellant explanation, but I do NOT agree with the conclusions this person comes to to fix the problems we face today. I am in favor of social insurance personally, not a libertarian facade for futher weakening our protection from corruption. " In strong and vibrant democracies, a generous social-welfare state is not a road to serfdom but rather to fairness, economic equality and international competitiveness. " Scientific American Magazine 5.

So what can we do to revive our democracy? What we are doing right now!

Quote:

A paper by Milton Friedman, published in the month before Dr. King spoke, and another by Edmund Phelps, published a few months later, gave reason to believe that in the long term, if unemployment falls below a certain rate, inflation speeds up, whereas if unemployment rises above that rate, inflation slows down. That magic unemployment number became known as the Non-Accelerating-Inflation Rate of Unemployment, usually abbreviated by the acronym NAIRU.By about 1980, during the term of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, it was accepted that the aim of interest-rate policy was to create enough unemployment to exert enough downward pressure on wages to give stable (and low) inflation. That didn't mean that central bankers always aimed at a particular unemployment rate — the NAIRU — because they didn't always know what the magic rate was. But it did mean that the Fed concentrated on inflation and accepted whatever the unemployment outcome might be. And it did mean that the Fed would sometimes cite falling unemployment as a sign of rising inflationary pressure, which supposedly had to be checked by raising interest rates.While central banks determined interest rates, governments still had a role in setting other policies so as to minimize the NAIRU. But eventually that role was limited to making life for the unemployed as unpleasant as possible, in order to maximize wage restraint for any given unemployment rate, and defining an unemployed person as narrowly as possible, so that official statistics understated the extent of unemployment. (Attacking workers' wages and conditions is also widely advocated, but harder to do in a democracy. That's one reason why some people prefer dictatorship.)http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_gavin_r__080401_still_on_the_mountai.htm

1. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/070409a.html

2.http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_gavin_r__080401_still_on_the_mountai.htm

3. http://www.themoneyblogs.com/trading/247wallst/one-percent-of-all-the-people-on-wall-st-make-ninety-nine-percent-of-all-the-profi

4. http://warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=NewsClips&ContentRecord_id=e5b11158-5f4e-44d0-8e53-f915fb1b9163&ContentType_id=5f9a18e6-6b7d-483f-b1b7-19d6af4c4c2c

5. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-social-welfare-state