Even the pundits most slavishly devoted to the myth of the free market think that the economy is in dire straits. Things look bad on many fronts and even those that denied that anything was wrong even as late as August now agree that the recession actually started in December of 2007. As the elections neared last year, it was accepted wisdom that all of our woes were due to the poor taking out shaky mortgages. Once that canard failed to hold up, the media stopped trying to come up with causes... [More]

David Rees weighs in with possibly one of the last GYWO cartoons ever. He started about eight years ago and has moved on to videos instead. As usual, he manages to capture that which is most important out of the miasma of obfuscation that the mainstream media emits (as Homer Simpson put it: “It’s funny because he says what we’re all thinking.”

get your war on 81 − #6

And the money quote, transcribed for posterity.

“Oh, enough with all the “broad bipartisan” bullshit! Did Republicans not got [sic] their asses totally... [More]”

Bill Watterson understood how things worked 15 years ago, which is pretty much how things still work today (click to see a larger version).

Calvin's Premium Lemonade Stand

The date for the cartoon was obtained from this comment, Re: $8.4 BILLION Profit for Oil Giant (This Quarter Only!) and the image originally found on the Truth About Cars blog. Another full transcript of the cartoon is available at Recurring themes in Calvin and Hobbes; Wikipedia, the original source has since been edited and longer contains it. Such... [More]

In discussions between two opposing viewpoints, people tend to choose a “winner” based on who’s willing to raise the volume and lower the level of discourse. If they can identify with one side’s points—or have no reason not to believe them—they tend to identify that way. Simplistic and specious reasoning, straw-man logic and outright, bold-faced lies often carry the day. Check out any Bill O’Reilly interview[1] and you’ll see a master of the form at work.

Now, the right-wing version involves ... [More]

So, suddenly everyone cares about macro-economics. Suddenly, we’ve upgraded our interest in the magic, money-making machine—this financial Perpetuum Mobile—from non-existent to frantic. For the longest time, very few of us cared exactly how it worked or why. No one bothered to ask why it was a given that investing in the market made sense—be it through funds, pensions or directly[1]—that’s why it’s called a given. (Duh.) We ignored clear signs that some were making out like bandits—and... [More]

As of the weekend, we heard that the Dow industrials [was] down over 5,500 points, or 39%, from year-ago peak (MarketWatch). It’s strange, though, because doesn’t crash mean that everything stops working? Crash means bread lines and digging holes and filling them in again to pass the time. At least, that’s what happened during the last crash. What does crash mean today? The internet clearly still works. Jets are still flying on time... [More]

They say that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, that it has stopped “working”. This sounds bad. However, before rushing to support whatever solution is put forward to fix it, it would be best to figure out what it was like when it was working smoothly. Only then can you know whether or not you want to fix it. Some of the votes of “no” to the bailout came from representatives that believed just that: that the goal is not to put everything back the way it was, with the same people... [More]

Most of us don’t follow the markets very assiduously. We buy into pensions or mutual funds or get CDs or money-market funds at the bank or we just have a savings account with decent... [More]

Even the most razor-sharp of hewers to the party line must be having a tremendous amount of psychic agony in trying to follow the script. If cognitive dissonance can cause actual, physical pain, then now is surely the time for it to do so. John McCain is praising the bailouts and buy-outs of major American financial institutions to high heaven, while at the same time calling for even less regulation—ostensibly because there are still a few banks that haven’t managed to glut themselves into... [More]

Two point five kids.

Four-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.

Two-car garage full of garden tools and two new cars in the driveway.

Good schools.

Fancy vacations.

Keeping up with the Joneses.

The American Dream.

It’s called a dream because it doesn’t seem realistic that it will come true for every American. And it doesn’t—but only for those losers who aren’t willing to work hard enough for it. That’s the hard-as-nails story anyway—the philosophical core of the American... [More]

Factors in Our Colossal Mess by Gabriel Kolko (CounterPunch) offers a nigh-panicked critique of the out-of-control hyper-captitalism found in the rarified air of the international financial instruments markets. With a name like that, it’s already clear that the intent is to hoodwink and the system does not disappoint. With the introduction of ever faster computing, ever more memory and ever tighter integration of information and communication, traders, who used to be limited in their schemes to invent money out of thin air,... [More]