Working people who didn't get rich off the fake Obama stock market aren't in an economic boom, but once they vote for a democrat the same Democrats tell t hem to fuck off. I am doing more than fine though and work too hard.
Doubt that we are in a boom? Well according to Dougster we've been in a boom since 2015. So I guess we still are.
No matter that more and more Americans are working in jobs with zero economic future or security. And no matter that more and more Americans are just living hand to mouth.
When it comes to jobs with benefits, stability, and liveable wages, according to Andy Stern we have not created a single one of these since the 2008 meltdown.
No matter that our economy is not sustainable environmentally, not on the world wide political stage either.
No matter that the current state of affairs depends upon using Eugenics and Social Darwinism to create a permanent untouchable caste.
No matter that this is fusing with Evangelical Christianity.
Rick and Kay Warren's Outreach Ministry, after they drove their 27yo son Matthew to suicide:
http://hope4mentalhealth.com/
But you got it right Dougseter, a boom, its about 1928 all over again!
"Another 8 years of the same policies and poverty will be completely eliminated in America", Herbert Hoover.
Sorry, skibum, can you explain what you mean by "Obama fake stock market". Also, in your opinion, is the rally since Trump was elected real or more of the same "fakeness".
The latest booms (post 1975) appear to be praying on the altar of Milton fkn Friedman. The company has fudiciary responsibility to the investors and owners alone and no community responsibility. So you have the productivity gains (post-1970) going to the investors and some for the management class, who pretend to be bourgeoisie or capitals and may be compensated as such but they aren't capitalists. Very little reinvestment in capital and very little given back to the communities or the working people.
Working people were under under the impression that capitalism worked, and for the booms between 1932-1975, it did. Maybe the Soviet Union and latent guilt from the Great Depression was the working man's best friend.
Not a boom. 2% growth, right? You wouldn't want to devalue your assets with too much inflation, right meat72. ;) (tongue in cheek, funny).
Yes Doug the fake stock market continues under Trump and it is all a scam cooked up by the Fed policy on holding interest rates artificially low to help corporations and the wealthy. People like Trump and Obama are simply two different sides of the same despicable coin.
No the market has be rallying primarily due to advances in technology in general and to a shortening of the product cycle in particular. Low rates was necessary for a short term time during the near depression that Obama prevented. (If Repub policies had been followed we would definitely have gone into depression). After a while, however, definitely by 2014 low rates were a hindrance to the rally, which is why we had that sideways market for a couple of years. Now that rates are rising, we see the market rallying again.
Too funny lol. We were never close to a depression. low rates were the way Obama and now trump scammed people into believing that we are in an economic boom, despite real wages advancing not at all; despite the fact no one has savings and despite the fact almost half of Americans have zero retirement assets. If we were really in an economic boom we would have inflation, which accompanies an economic boom, but we don't We have people with 401 k's looking good, on paper and that's it. We continue to kick the can down the road, which is fine because as an older person I doubt I will be here when your children pay the tab you ran up. The fact 25 agrees with you is proof positive you are incorrect. Hey how was International women's day? How'd you look in red?
So apple google and amazon all up over 1000%since 2009 all tech companies what have you got in the way of evidence councilor that shows you know anything at all about markets or economies. Best you come up with is scam I guess. Sad.
As far as I can see, each one of these bubbles works by reinventing business to offer lower wages and less job security, but more micromanagement. At least we have had Obama Care, at least for a while longer.
Skibum wrote, "low rates were the way Obama and now trump scammed people into believing that we are in an economic boom, despite real wages advancing not at all; despite the fact no one has savings and despite the fact almost half of Americans have zero retirement assets. If we were really in an economic boom we would have inflation, which accompanies an economic boom, but we don't We have people with 401 k's looking good, on paper and that's it."
Wow, I never thought I'd be agreeing with him. But he sees people's finance data.
SJG and skidum in agreement about the market this has to be the beginning of the apocalypse. Two of the four horsemen searching for the other two.
Maybe the charts converging
ROFLMAO
Granted this does not include the last few years, but growth of 2% seems more normal than a boom. I do agree for a few, there is a boom. the top 10% income distribution ($162,019) and wealthy people with financial assets. Plus those in the tech sector.
But that was like TheeOSU posting a piece where (Louis or Carl) Stokes had achieved prosperity against more odds than all of whiny liberals on Tuscl combined, so we should shut up and agree there is economic opportunity for all.
I personally am doing what I can to get the fk out of the bottom 80% ($117,133) and proto!
Dougster, do you really think there is a boom for someone earning median income in the U.S. today? I have to agree with Skibum609 and SJG, here.
SJG, booms can also be driven by demographics. Agrarian people moving to the cities. That increased productivity. Switching from manufacturing and industry jobs to knowledge and information jobs then again to service sector. A Baby boom. Women entering the workforce. Immigration at the beginning of last century.
The problems with some demographics is they are largely one time events which cannot be repeated.
But the top 0.1% has seen a 700% boom in 150 years. Meanwhile the rest of us get 1.6%. I'm not saving inequality is bad. But to say most people are feeling a "boom." I just don't see it in the data (including the anecdotal data skibum provided from 35 years of seeing clients' financials). I just don't.
Dare we consider the degree to which corporate empowerment, combined with the "war on the poor," has actually stripped Americans of any power they had? Try to improve your wages and working conditions, and the company will threaten to ship out your job. Try a walk-out? You can easily be replaced by morning.
What we did: Since the 1980s, we shipped out a huge chunk of our jobs. In the 1990s, we ended actual welfare, increasing the number of people who are absolutely desperate for any job at any wage (there is nothing to fall back on). In the process, we created an abundant surplus of job-ready people, desperate and willing to replace you at half the pay. Give some thought to the broad impact of this agenda.
Now what? Another year of liberals merely maintaining a pep rally for the middle class is pointless.
The problem is not D or R but American Exceptionalism that most Americans believe-- you can do everything and anything and get away with it; yes, that plundering worked for three centuries, but the world and its resources are finite, and now we have reached the boundaries. Talk to anyone from another country and they distinguish themselves from us as a block for that reason.
millennials want to talk about this but then they are pigeon holed but conservatives for be globalists or one world government people.
The truth is the planet Earth cannot support 7 billion people with a western (U.S.) lifestyle. Increasingly we are seeing that the U.S. can't support 300 million people with a upper-middle class lifestyle. So there will be haves and have nots.
Like meat72, I am learning my heart can bleed blue no longer. Thus I am changing to team red. At 39 years, my economy is the only economy that matters to me.
Locally we have Neo-Liberals, basically Republicans who claim to be Democrats. They talk on camera about restructuring college loan debts and raising the minimum wage, while they replace office holders with more conservative people. They know that these things are not likely to happen. But they want their people elected as they favor movers and shakers and their booms and busts over working people.
And then they talk about the idea of STEM education, basically a way of shifting the blame for the ravages of neo-liberal capitalism, which Dominic77 chronicles, back onto working people.
Meanwhile housing and college continue to become more unaffordable, and more and more people graduating from college end up in low paying dead end micromanagement jobs.
And all of this is DURING A SO CALLED BOOM, where unemployment is claimed to be below the ever so sensitive number of 4%.
For so long it had looked like Marx and Engels had been wrong.
SJG -- > “They had said that Silicon Valley had a bit less than 4% unemployment, but looking at the situation on the ground, it has never looked good.”
Right, SJG. Unemployment only looks within labor force participation. Estimates have labor force participation around 60-62%, which means about 40% of able bodied adults are just not working at all.
Plus I think to be counted as employed one needs only work 1 hour a month. That’s even before we consider underemployed people and people not working in their fields (unassuming they have a useful college degree).
What we need more of is entry-level engineering jobs. That is what STEM graduates need and many of the new jobs aren’t these. So it’s the old Mexican standoff - - can’t get a job without experience can’t get experience without a job. -_-
Most of the people on this board who speak in favor of the boom, they are advocating for American Exceptionalism. And, yes, Democrats go along with it just as Republicans do.
We have one here who claims to be an Authority on Average Americans, and he is a mouth piece for Fox.
Jeremy Rifkin, long term labor historian. He goes on about how you can cite the end of the American Dream in the rise of these state lotteries and licensed casinos.
https://www.amazon.com/European-Dream-Eu…
But Dominic is right, natural resources are limited, as is our society's ability to consume. Our so called booms and not sustainable. Capitalism never solves problems, it creates problems because it scrambles social codes. And then it expands to operate at a larger scale, and telling people that this will bring good for all.
Capitalism has always depended on scapegoats in order to maintain work force discipline. Welfare has always been organized to do that, make the poor into public scapegoats, instead of providing for them.
We used to get our scapegoats in the immigrants and minorities who did low wage and slave labor. But today, less labor of anytime is needed. So today we use the mental health system and the disabilities industry to make the scape goats of the middle-class family into our public scape goats.
America also has soaring expenses. In 1980, Reagan had Education, Housing, and Healthcare at 25% total national spending. Today, under Trump it is 36% and rising. Thanks, SJG.
The FED play tricks with the interest rates plus it can increase the money supply. They seem to do this IMO to ease out the booms and busts. If they can keep the 2% grow up year to year, without a bust, that will be impressive.
STEM education is a political shibboleth, a way of saying that working people are not qualified for the jobs they have, and to blame them for the unworkability of our economic system. Our neo-liberal politicians talk about this all the time.
For those who want such education, it is great. But to make it into a justification for dismantling public resources which promote critical thinking, is just plain wrong.
Just an aside, in the organization I am building, for our own people, all of these problems will be solved, economic security, life long education, always extremely challenging work every single day, intense political activism, and stripper grade hotties draining your dry 365 days per year.
Well Keynesianism calls for such actions. It worked for 40 years.
Then middle eastern countries decided that they wanted something fair for their oil, and so American's got mad and elected Ronald Reagan, and its been down hill ever since.
And here comes the batshit crazy.
>Just an aside, in the organization I am building, for our own people, all of these problems will be solved, economic security, life long education, always extremely challenging work every single day, intense political activism, and stripper grade hotties draining your dry 365 days per year.<
^^^^^^ You got it, that is how it is developing locally, and that it how it will be.
Just think about it:
1. Culture which supports ongoing independent study education.
2. Work is very demanding as people are supposed to come up with systematic solutions. Usually this means computer software approaches. And it answers to someone who has always demanded this of subordinantes, me.
3. Very selective about which men are invited, high level of mathematical and philosophical competence. We can beat outside people in almost any undertaking.
4. Women understand what is expected of them, and to gain rank they have to be onboard, and they are very well taken care of lifelong. They get a better deal with us than in marriage, sex work, or any other undertaking.
I learned long ago that there are three things which don't really need to cost money, Knowledge, Spirituality, and Sex. But people slave away their whole lives for these and get nothing. What is needed to make things change is to forcefully reject middle-class values.
You ever really thought about how women think, tried to see it from their POV, looked at things like new dating relationships, marriages, soft core strip clubs, and hard core strip clubs, and tried to make sense of it all. They can't be coerced. But they don't need to be. Mostly they compete with each other. You never want to lose this either.
And of course the worst situation, the equivalent of slavery, is marriage.
@skihomo: Let's see. I remember C under $1, WFC down to $6.67. Can't even remember how low BAC got? I know it was under $5. $3.50? Nah, not even close to a depression. Plenty of inflation, IME. Don't trust the official measures.
The fact that you and 25 disagree is pretty good evidence you are wrong all by itself. Let's see what the result last time you and he disagreed. About which one of you was a liar? Oh, yes. You came up with ZERO proof he was, and he can up with five direct quotes of yours showing you were. Your response? None other than sound of your feet running. You must be some kind of a lawyer if you get so easily clobbered on arguments here.
The last three companies I've work have had (officially unoffical, but unofficially well understand) policy that there is infinite hiring quotas for anyone qualified. Officially you would have to ask for a req, but unofficially if the person is qualified you won't be turned down. And it's also rare to run out of your official reqs to begin with.
The problem is people's qualifications not demand for qualified people. And what I said about infinite practical hiring would apply especially to new grads.
In the private sector, there is no job security anymore. Companies let the older more experienced, better paid workers go all the time.
One party promises better health care, then make it worse, your premiums jump. Then the other party gets in office, promises to fix it, then it gets even more expensive and covers even less. I read with the republican plan, older workers will need to work longer just to pay for Heath insurance, blocking younger workers from getting jobs because they won't be retiring as soon as they could have.
The other thing was I was watching the market pretty much tick for tick back in early 2009. You can tell there are moments when the bottom just falls out of the market. (Jesse Livermore wrote about them). They happened with the financial more than once. They only think that saved the market was that the White House was watching, and would make an announcement that an unspecified announcement was coming up. It was great. Usually after that you would 20% rallies. Those were the days. Now, of course, skihomo didn't witness any of this first hand, unlike yours truly, and can only go by whatever he is told to believe the right wing nut jobs he follows.
Infinite hiring quota? Well those finance companies can do whatever the hell they want. It isn't relevant to anything anyway.
But ideas like that are what some of our local politicos use to denigrate and marginalize working people, saying that they aren't qualified for the jobs the have. All just more neo-liberalism.
Very happy oil has dropped. That's more stimulus at play, or better yet it helps cushion any rise in interest rates, as it keeps some of the inflation as seen staying low, even lagging a bit. It's a goldilocks scenario. We know it won't last too much longer....but long termers need not to pay attention.
46 comments
(Usain is pronounced Insane)
No matter that more and more Americans are working in jobs with zero economic future or security. And no matter that more and more Americans are just living hand to mouth.
When it comes to jobs with benefits, stability, and liveable wages, according to Andy Stern we have not created a single one of these since the 2008 meltdown.
No matter that our economy is not sustainable environmentally, not on the world wide political stage either.
No matter that the current state of affairs depends upon using Eugenics and Social Darwinism to create a permanent untouchable caste.
No matter that this is fusing with Evangelical Christianity.
Rick and Kay Warren's Outreach Ministry, after they drove their 27yo son Matthew to suicide:
http://hope4mentalhealth.com/
But you got it right Dougseter, a boom, its about 1928 all over again!
"Another 8 years of the same policies and poverty will be completely eliminated in America", Herbert Hoover.
SJG
Is it possible to pay enough hookers for sex to be able to save Capitalism from itself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0NzALRJ…
:)
SJG
:)
If it weren't for the incredible amount of porn that I view, read and have dance in my lap, I'd say that this site was twisting my mind.
If it weren't for the incredible amount of porn that I view, read and have dance in my lap, I'd say that this site was twisting my mind.
Working people were under under the impression that capitalism worked, and for the booms between 1932-1975, it did. Maybe the Soviet Union and latent guilt from the Great Depression was the working man's best friend.
Not a boom. 2% growth, right? You wouldn't want to devalue your assets with too much inflation, right meat72. ;) (tongue in cheek, funny).
Can paying hookers for sex be enough to save Capitalism from itself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0NzALRJ…
Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvd18-s8…
Occult Symbolism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9qcaGbI…
How We See the Future
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLxe92Eg…
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Da2nPIA2…
Blue Ray Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2M5kiSM…
Review
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLz_tOdw…
Skibum wrote, "low rates were the way Obama and now trump scammed people into believing that we are in an economic boom, despite real wages advancing not at all; despite the fact no one has savings and despite the fact almost half of Americans have zero retirement assets. If we were really in an economic boom we would have inflation, which accompanies an economic boom, but we don't We have people with 401 k's looking good, on paper and that's it."
Wow, I never thought I'd be agreeing with him. But he sees people's finance data.
SJG
Maybe the charts converging
ROFLMAO
But I know that this bubble is not the last. But at least when it bursts, we have some chance to make changes.
SJG
(The line is fitted to 1.6 %)
Granted this does not include the last few years, but growth of 2% seems more normal than a boom. I do agree for a few, there is a boom. the top 10% income distribution ($162,019) and wealthy people with financial assets. Plus those in the tech sector.
But that was like TheeOSU posting a piece where (Louis or Carl) Stokes had achieved prosperity against more odds than all of whiny liberals on Tuscl combined, so we should shut up and agree there is economic opportunity for all.
I personally am doing what I can to get the fk out of the bottom 80% ($117,133) and proto!
Dougster, do you really think there is a boom for someone earning median income in the U.S. today? I have to agree with Skibum609 and SJG, here.
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/03/sa…
Bring it on Baby! Just don't walk under high rises.
SJG
Stalking Under Age Girls, and Keeping a Shrine! Which Tuscler is this?
http://abc7news.com/news/sc-sheriff-says…
STEM Education Crisis a Myth
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/educati…
The problems with some demographics is they are largely one time events which cannot be repeated.
But the top 0.1% has seen a 700% boom in 150 years. Meanwhile the rest of us get 1.6%. I'm not saving inequality is bad. But to say most people are feeling a "boom." I just don't see it in the data (including the anecdotal data skibum provided from 35 years of seeing clients' financials). I just don't.
It is just Dougster and his friends boosting for it. A growth in the boosting industry. That is our boom.
They had said that Silicon Valley had a bit less than 4% unemployment, but looking at the situation on the ground, it has never looked good.
But bring it on, Crisis in Capitalism!
SJG
What we did: Since the 1980s, we shipped out a huge chunk of our jobs. In the 1990s, we ended actual welfare, increasing the number of people who are absolutely desperate for any job at any wage (there is nothing to fall back on). In the process, we created an abundant surplus of job-ready people, desperate and willing to replace you at half the pay. Give some thought to the broad impact of this agenda.
Now what? Another year of liberals merely maintaining a pep rally for the middle class is pointless.
millennials want to talk about this but then they are pigeon holed but conservatives for be globalists or one world government people.
The truth is the planet Earth cannot support 7 billion people with a western (U.S.) lifestyle. Increasingly we are seeing that the U.S. can't support 300 million people with a upper-middle class lifestyle. So there will be haves and have nots.
Like meat72, I am learning my heart can bleed blue no longer. Thus I am changing to team red. At 39 years, my economy is the only economy that matters to me.
And I am certainly not involved in any pep rally for the middle-class.
Phil Ochs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u52Oz-54…
Locally we have Neo-Liberals, basically Republicans who claim to be Democrats. They talk on camera about restructuring college loan debts and raising the minimum wage, while they replace office holders with more conservative people. They know that these things are not likely to happen. But they want their people elected as they favor movers and shakers and their booms and busts over working people.
And then they talk about the idea of STEM education, basically a way of shifting the blame for the ravages of neo-liberal capitalism, which Dominic77 chronicles, back onto working people.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/educati…
Meanwhile housing and college continue to become more unaffordable, and more and more people graduating from college end up in low paying dead end micromanagement jobs.
And all of this is DURING A SO CALLED BOOM, where unemployment is claimed to be below the ever so sensitive number of 4%.
For so long it had looked like Marx and Engels had been wrong.
We need to learn from revolutionaries of past times. Bobby Sands
https://nothingtobegainedhere.files.word…
SJG
Jeff Healey - All Along The Watchtower
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-auxhDl…
Right, SJG. Unemployment only looks within labor force participation. Estimates have labor force participation around 60-62%, which means about 40% of able bodied adults are just not working at all.
Plus I think to be counted as employed one needs only work 1 hour a month. That’s even before we consider underemployed people and people not working in their fields (unassuming they have a useful college degree).
What we need more of is entry-level engineering jobs. That is what STEM graduates need and many of the new jobs aren’t these. So it’s the old Mexican standoff - - can’t get a job without experience can’t get experience without a job. -_-
We have one here who claims to be an Authority on Average Americans, and he is a mouth piece for Fox.
Jeremy Rifkin, long term labor historian. He goes on about how you can cite the end of the American Dream in the rise of these state lotteries and licensed casinos.
https://www.amazon.com/European-Dream-Eu…
and
https://www.amazon.com/End-This-Depressi…
But Dominic is right, natural resources are limited, as is our society's ability to consume. Our so called booms and not sustainable. Capitalism never solves problems, it creates problems because it scrambles social codes. And then it expands to operate at a larger scale, and telling people that this will bring good for all.
Capitalism has always depended on scapegoats in order to maintain work force discipline. Welfare has always been organized to do that, make the poor into public scapegoats, instead of providing for them.
We used to get our scapegoats in the immigrants and minorities who did low wage and slave labor. But today, less labor of anytime is needed. So today we use the mental health system and the disabilities industry to make the scape goats of the middle-class family into our public scape goats.
SJG
Well that creates a pretty tough situation. And then the level who are underemployed, or just employed in pure bullshit? Much higher.
And then of needing more STEM education?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/img/09STEMeduca…
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/educati…
STEM education is a political shibboleth, a way of saying that working people are not qualified for the jobs they have, and to blame them for the unworkability of our economic system. Our neo-liberal politicians talk about this all the time.
For those who want such education, it is great. But to make it into a justification for dismantling public resources which promote critical thinking, is just plain wrong.
Just an aside, in the organization I am building, for our own people, all of these problems will be solved, economic security, life long education, always extremely challenging work every single day, intense political activism, and stripper grade hotties draining your dry 365 days per year.
SJG
Then middle eastern countries decided that they wanted something fair for their oil, and so American's got mad and elected Ronald Reagan, and its been down hill ever since.
SJG
>Just an aside, in the organization I am building, for our own people, all of these problems will be solved, economic security, life long education, always extremely challenging work every single day, intense political activism, and stripper grade hotties draining your dry 365 days per year.<
Just think about it:
1. Culture which supports ongoing independent study education.
2. Work is very demanding as people are supposed to come up with systematic solutions. Usually this means computer software approaches. And it answers to someone who has always demanded this of subordinantes, me.
3. Very selective about which men are invited, high level of mathematical and philosophical competence. We can beat outside people in almost any undertaking.
4. Women understand what is expected of them, and to gain rank they have to be onboard, and they are very well taken care of lifelong. They get a better deal with us than in marriage, sex work, or any other undertaking.
I learned long ago that there are three things which don't really need to cost money, Knowledge, Spirituality, and Sex. But people slave away their whole lives for these and get nothing. What is needed to make things change is to forcefully reject middle-class values.
SJG
And of course the worst situation, the equivalent of slavery, is marriage.
SJG
The fact that you and 25 disagree is pretty good evidence you are wrong all by itself. Let's see what the result last time you and he disagreed. About which one of you was a liar? Oh, yes. You came up with ZERO proof he was, and he can up with five direct quotes of yours showing you were. Your response? None other than sound of your feet running. You must be some kind of a lawyer if you get so easily clobbered on arguments here.
Lol!
The problem is people's qualifications not demand for qualified people. And what I said about infinite practical hiring would apply especially to new grads.
One party promises better health care, then make it worse, your premiums jump. Then the other party gets in office, promises to fix it, then it gets even more expensive and covers even less. I read with the republican plan, older workers will need to work longer just to pay for Heath insurance, blocking younger workers from getting jobs because they won't be retiring as soon as they could have.
The other thing was I was watching the market pretty much tick for tick back in early 2009. You can tell there are moments when the bottom just falls out of the market. (Jesse Livermore wrote about them). They happened with the financial more than once. They only think that saved the market was that the White House was watching, and would make an announcement that an unspecified announcement was coming up. It was great. Usually after that you would 20% rallies. Those were the days. Now, of course, skihomo didn't witness any of this first hand, unlike yours truly, and can only go by whatever he is told to believe the right wing nut jobs he follows.
But ideas like that are what some of our local politicos use to denigrate and marginalize working people, saying that they aren't qualified for the jobs the have. All just more neo-liberalism.
SJG
Mystery Babalon
https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Babalon-B…
Gustav Holtz, The Planets, for Organ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_avJDA9E…
KKW Trucking, Pomona California
http://www.kkwtrucks.com/
Soma Luna, Bloomington Indiana
http://www.somaluna.com/pages/no-parent-…
ASG Building Automation
http://www.asgbms.com/