While the U.S. economy continues to make modest improvements but tens of millions of Americans still suffer from extremely grim employment figures, the situation in Britain shows no signs of any improvement whatsoever.
In fact, Brad DeLong writes, the British economy is now doing worse than it did in the Great Depression:
Yep. This many months after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly converging back to its pre-depression level of production under Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain’s policy of using stimulative policies to restore the price level to its pre-Great Depression trajectory. [...]
In less than a year, if current forecasts come true, the Cameron-Osborne Depression will not be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but the worst depression in Britain … probably ever.
That is quite an accomplishment. [...]
Here’s a chart showing Britain’s gross domestic product performance in the Great Depression and three recessions prior to the current one. In case you’re afflicted by a bit of colorblindness, as I am, that line which flattens out at minus 4 percent on the far right of the chart is where the U.K. is now:
(National Institute of Economic and Social ResearchâU.K.)
What went wrong? DeLong cites Guardian economics correspondent Philip Inman, who wrote earlier this week:
Much of the UK’s plan for recovery from the financial crisis was based on a full-throttle recovery in 2012. This was going to be the year that a return of consumer confidence, business investment and general spending would converge to send the economy on a trajectory of above-average growth. Maybe we would even get back some of the output we lost in the crash. [...]
Business investment has already slumped and confidence indexes show few consumers are ready to spend outside key periods such as Christmas. [...]
And the lack of investment will perplex ministers. They have done what the right-wing economists told them to do and moved out of the way — the theory being that public sector spending and investment was “crowding out” the private sector.
That’s the theory of right-wing economists and politicians in the United States, too. Kill as much government spending as possible and get out of the way so the private sector can “do its job.” We’ll be hearing a lot of that kind of talk in the coming months as the Republicans whittle down the bevy of candidates to the one who will meet Barack Obama come November.
Unfortunately, many Americans will buy their argument because of the economy’s weak performance, only 1.6 percent growth in gross domestic product for all of 2011, and forecasts of even less than that for the first quarter of 2012. Their call for lower taxes on the wealthy and fewer regulations on the the financial sector is exactly the wrong approach. Don’t believe it? Ask your working-class friends across the pond.
In a series of cases, many decided in the last few weeks, the federal courts have upheld the controversial “stop-loss” policy, which requires soldiers to remain in the military beyond their contracted term.
On Tuesday , a federal judge threw out a claim brought by two soldiers, David Qualls and Rafael Perez. Qualls’ case was dismissed as moot because he voluntarily re-enlisted after filing suit in 2004. Qualls said he re-enlisted to get the $ 15,000 to avoid bankruptcy and provide for his family and children. As for Perez’s claim, the judge ruled there was no evidence that his recruiter misled him, nor was their a contractual breach on the part of the government. There were initially eight soldiers in the lawsuit, but six dropped out after the judge refused to grant their request to stay anonymous.
Meanwhile, in Doe v. Rumsfeld (2006 WL 62337), the Ninth Circuit also upheld the military’s stop-loss policy, ruling that the policy is a “valid exercise of presidential power authorized by 10 U.S.C. § 12305(a).”
DixonRants fanpage: www.TinyURL.com In this video, I compare the education of five liberal commentators to that of five conservative commentators. First, I list off the college educations of five liberal commentators, which includes Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz, Chris Mathews, and Cenk Uygur. After that, I create an enumerated list of five conservative commentators, in the order of trust the most, to trust the least (although in reality, I trust none of them). In my findings, I found that the five conservative commentators that I researched, which included Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, matched the list of “trust the most to trust the least” and the amount of education that each one received after high school. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so…
For months the cheerful, kindly renegade Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has acted like a victim when it comes to attention given the racist newsletters that were published two decades ago under his name. He’s chastised reporters for pestering him about them, cut off interviews because, he said, he’d answered all the questions long ago. He put forth stories that he himself would soon punch holes in. He was disconnected from the newsletter operation, he claimed. He didn’t read all the newsletters. He didn’t approve of everything that went in them ahead of time. He didn’t even know who wrote them. When he later would read them, he was appalled.
Such explanations never passed the smell test. Yet some people who should have blasted him did give him a pass because of his stances on a handful of issues, foreign policy, civil liberties and the war on drugs. When confronted with the fact that Paul’s philosophy would trade what he considers federal tyranny with state tyranny, he still collected kudos. He got respect from debate moderators, his fellow candidates, audiences and some progressives.
The fact that most of his foreign policy ideas are driven by xenophobic isolationism, that his perspective on civil liberties is a cramped one that doesn’t include, for instance, reproductive rights and that he thinks the Civil War and the civil rights movement of a hundred years later should never have happened because both slavery and Jim Crow would have eventually gone away anyway seemed not to give his supporters much pause. The guy’s just a little quirky. And the newsletters? Irrelevant and the allegations unfounded.
Jerry Markon and Alice Crites have put the lie to that claim. They report rather than being unengaged and stand-offish, Paul was deeply involved in the operations of the newsletter company, Ron Paul & Associates, signed off on articles and spoke “to staff members virtually every day.”
“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman. [...]
Paul “had to walk a very fine line,’’ said Eric Dondero Rittberg, a former longtime Paul aide who says Paul allowed the controversial material in his newsletter as a way to make money. Dondero Rittberg said he witnessed Paul proofing, editing and signing off on his newsletters in the mid-1990s.
Some will no doubt argue, have argued, in fact, that Paul is not personally a racist. That he only inserted the incendiary racist stuff into an already noxiously conspiratorial and loony newsletter to make money, not because he actually believed any of it. This is an old argument. But, even if it’s true in Paul’s case, a lack of personal bigotry against other people because of their ethnicity or skin color isn’t required to make one a racist. Stirring up hatred and pushing philosophies and policies that serve to keep others “in their place” is what matters. That’s what Paul engaged in. And that is the epitome of racism.
When Adm. Eric Olson, the former leader of U.S. Special Operations Command, wanted to explain where his forces were going, he would show audiences a photo that NASA took, titled “The World at Night.” The lit areas showed the governed, stable, orderly parts of the planet. The areas without lights were the danger zones — the impoverished, the power vacuums, the places overrun with militants that prompted the attention of elite U.S. troops. And few places were darker, in Olson’s eyes, than East Africa.
Quietly, and especially over the last two to three years, special operations forces have focused on that very shadowy spot on NASA’s map. The successful Tuesday night raid to free two humanitarian aid workers from captivity in Somalia is only the most recent and high-profile example. More and more elite forces have transited through a mega-base in Djibouti that’s a staging ground for strikes on al-Qaida allies in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia.
It’s not quite the new Pakistan, or even the new Yemen, but it’s close — especially as new bases for the U.S.’s Shadow Wars pop up and expand. The U.S. military sometimes seemed like it was casting about for a reason to set up shop in Africa. Counterterrorism has given it one. [...]
Nor is the military the only U.S. organization at work in east Africa. Somalia has attracted the CIA as well, which runs a secret prison attached to the Mogadishu airport. During earlier iterations of the CIA’s post-9/11 involvement in Somalia, it blustered that its operations were protected by drones that actually weren’t overhead—all while it assembled a coalition of friendly warlords to help fight al-Qaida. Nor has the FBI been left out of the action: it worked with the special operations forces to free Buchanan and Thisted on Tuesday night, although Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, said no FBI personnel accompanied the raiding team.
In the wake of the Tucson shooting, as Americans debate the best way to prevent another such tragedy, Arizona State Senator Linda Gray has weighed in with her own special brand of crazy:
Training of people to respect human life. It is ironic that today today is the day 38 years ago that the Supreme Court said we do not have to respect the life of an unborn and we have gone through now more then a generation of people, a large number of people who believe that it is fine to take an infant prior to it being born and to kill it. What type of respect is that for human life? So now we have this generation of people who have that idea and it continues on, that why respect life if we can kill an infant who can’t defend themselves. It goes back to the value in the creation of life and the respect for that life and if your not trained and have that type of character in realizing that all human life deserves respect this is what our country has come to.
Got that? Jared Loughner attempted to assassinate Rep. Gabby Giffords because abortion is legal. Let that one sink in for a minute.
Newt Gingrich continued his OWS-themed campaign against Mitt Romney in Mt. Dora, FL
If Newt Gingrich can pull off something like this directly to Mitt Romney’s face during tonight’s debate, Mitt’s going to have a long, long night:
“We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who have foreclosed on Florida and is himself a stock holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about,” Gingrich declared in a preamble to a decidedly angry stump speech.
“In 1992, he gave money to Democrats for Congress,” he added at another point. “He voted in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. This is the man who stood up the other night and questioned my credentials as a Reaganite? This is the kind of gall they have, to think we are so stupid and we are so timid that we will let someone who voted for Paul Tsongas -– in 1994 he is running for the U.S. Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Do you know how hard it is to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy? And he says, ‘You know, I don’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, I was an independent then.’”
“He won’t tell you that now, because he is counting on us not having YouTube,” Gingrich said. “That’s how much he thinks we are stupid. And we are not stupid. The message we should give Mitt Romney is: we aren’t that stupid and you aren’t that clever.”
Yes, I know some of this is bullshit: Paul Tsongas wasn’t the most liberal candidate, and Mitt Romney wasn’t running to Ted Kennedy’s left. But if you’re Mitt Romney, a Republican primary debate isn’t when you don’t want to be explaining why you were voting in the Democratic primary in 1992 or how it was only on some issues that you were trying outflank Kennedy. And if Newt Gingrich is able to respond to Mitt Romney’s attacks tonight with as much focus as he mustered earlier today and against the media in prior debates, Mitt Romney is going to find himself in a world of hurt.
US Republican Congress Hate Speech Rally against Obama John Boehner Eric Cantor Michele Bachmann Steve King Rachel Maddow Keith Olbermann Ed show Chris Mathews hardball jon voight Video Rating: 4 / 5
US Republican Congress Hate Speech Rally against Obama John Boehner Eric Cantor Michele Bachmann Steve King Rachel Maddow Keith Olbermann Ed show Chris Mathews hardball Video Rating: 4 / 5
For the larger part of the 2012 campaign, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has enjoyed frontrunner status, and one of the benefits of being thought of as the top dog has been his ability to attract a laundry list of endorsers. But now that Newt Gingrich has thrown the entire race into disarray, winning South Carolina and blunting Mitt’s national momentum, he’s started to notch some key supporters of his own. Like Chuck Norris, for example! Action-movie hero, Mike Huckabee confidant, viral-video star — Norris had it all, and the announcement that he’d swung behind Gingrich had the Internet straight blowin’ up.
And then there’s — well … also … uhm, Fred Thompson. Right? He also endorsed Newt. And that’s pretty sweet … we guess. You probably know Thompson best for the way he perfected the art of sitting around well-appointed offices, drawling lugubriously, in the “Law And Order” series. Also, he was a candidate for the GOP nomination in 2008. He basically ran on the platform that he’d do what he could to muster up some interest in running the country, one or two days a week, as long as — you know — everyone agreed to not be all “in your face” about it.
OK, well, it seems pretty clear that in the political arena, the name Fred Thompson is basically associated with the word, “Feh.” And that’s why despite the fact that he’s actually a more “serious” political personage, it was Chuck Norris who got all the attention for his Newt support. Well, that’s a shame, and we did something about it. HuffPost’s Hunter Stuart combined Thompson’s support of Newt Gingrich with the one thing we know Thompson has — a childlike enthusiasm for reverse mortgages — to fashion the endorsement roll-out ad that everyone deserved.
Are there racial differences in self-reported stress and self-esteem? Perhaps, suggests a great survey released this week by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. (There’s a lot of great data in the extensive survey, and it’s worth checking out the multiplearticles and full toplines.)
Both black women and black men have higher self-esteem than their white counterparts, the study shows. Nearly three-fourths of black men and two-thirds of black women “strongly agree” with the sentence “I see myself as someone who has high self-esteem.” By comparison, 59% of white men, and fewer than half of white women strongly agree.
Similarly, black men and women say they’re less stressed. Fewer than a third of black men say they “frequently” experience stress, compared to 44% of white men. Four in ten black women frequently experience stress, yet just over half of white women say the same.
Here are some reactions to President Obama’s State of the Union address.
Scott Paul, Executive Director, the Alliance for American Manufacturing:
A speech alone won’t change policy, but it can lay the groundwork. We look forward to working with the White House as it cracks down on China’s cheating, which is stealing jobs and jeopardizing our economic future.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee:
The president just doesn’t get it. No economic plan can succeed that ignores our staggering and surging debt.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi :
President Obama offered a clear path to help small businesses succeed and hire, provide tax relief for our workers, rebuild America, and provide aid to those who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” said. “It will put Americans back to work and it will be paid for.
Mitt Romney, running scared in Florida:
“Tonight will mark another chapter in the misguided policies of the last three years— and the failed leadership of one man.”
Sen. John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts:
There was a lot of common sense and even more common ground in tonight’s address. We shouldn’t have to wait for another year or another election to act like it. Tax reform, energy security, infrastructure and jobs matter to all of us and we’re so much closer on these issues than the shrillness of our politics pretends we are.”
Rep. Paul Broun, Republican of Maryland Georgia, tweeted the President during the speech:
“Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.”
Jared Bernstein, formerly Chief Economist and Economic Adviser to Vice President Joe Biden:
This wasn’t “win the future” with a long-term investment agenda. It was “build on the momentum we’ve got right now“ by creating incentives for manufacturers, skills for workers, jobs in fossil fuel extraction and clean energy innovation, all financed by a fairer tax code.
Nothing better than to wake up to this. A senior U.S. Central Command official will provide a background briefing regarding Iraq’s potential use of oil as a terror weapon.
Sounds like an Onion article, doesn’t it?
Reader BZ, who brought this beauty to my attention, summed it up perfectly: What’s next? Sand as WMD? [...]
Update: Upon further thought, this strategy starts making more and more sense. If Bush and Co. can pull it off, why stop with Iraq? It would provide ample justification to go after administration thorn-in-the-sides Venezuela and Iran. And at that point could we really ignore Saudi Arabia’s “arsenal”?
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