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October 12, 2011

“Dean Baker” – Excuses for a Pathetic Recovery

October 11, 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/11/excuses-for-a-pathetic-recovery/

by DEAN BAKER

The September jobs report showed that the U.S. economy created just 103,000 jobs in the month, 45,000 of which were the jobs of Verizon workers who were returning from a strike in August. The economy has created 99,000 jobs a month over the last three months, about 9,000 more than it needs to keep pace with the growth of labor force. At this pace, it will be around 80 years until the economy gets back to normal levels of unemployment.

Nonetheless, the news accounts told the public that the jobs numbers were better than expected. After all, at least the number of jobs is growing; the economy has not sunk back into recession.

Of course slow growth is better than a recession. But this is like saying that we are better off with one major hurricane hitting the East Coast than two. This is true, but why would we expect that two major hurricanes would hit the East Coast in the same year?

This is the same logic with the double-dip recession story. In the last several months many economic analysts have been running around with scary stories about a double-dip recession. While the stories were scary, they never made much sense.

“Rev. Jesse Jackson” – Winning the Class War: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution

October 11, 2011

by Rev. JESSE JACKSON

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/11/winning-the-class-war/

Occupy Wall Street protests have now spread to some 800 cities.  It’s spreading like a fire on a strong wind over a dry field.  The heat is likely to keep on building.

Conservatives have fallen over themselves rushing to side with the top 1% against the rest.  Eric Cantor, House majority leader, denounces “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.”  Herman Cain dismisses the demonstrators as “anti-American.”  Mitt Romney accuses them of waging “class warfare.”

But class warfare is the reason Occupy Wall Street has sounded such a chord.  Sure there’s class warfare, one of America’s richest men, Warren Buffett, concluded, “and my class is winning.”

Last week just before I left for Europe, I joined the Chicago “wing” of the Occupy Wall Street movement last week.  I spoke to students who dropped out of school because they couldn’t afford tuition; now they are left with guaranteed student loan debt.

Students graduate with average student loan debts of over $20,000, and the bankers lobby passes a law that forces payment of those debts, even after bankruptcy.  Now students are graduating from college laden with debts and without a job.  Any wonder they are protesting.

I spoke with professors and teachers who have lost their jobs, as state’s face declining revenues – driven in part by the foreclosure/housing crisis and resulting loss of property tax revenues.

“Lawrence Wittner” – Romney’s Neocon Foreign Policy Plan

By Prof. Lawrence S. Wittner

Global Research, October 11, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27026

Presidential contender Mitt Romney has laid out his vision for a foreign policy in a Romney administration – and it looks like it could have been dreamt up by the same neocons who guided George W. Bush’s disastrous pursuit of permanent U.S. military dominance. 

If current polls are correct, Mitt Romney seems likely to become the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and, quite possibly, the next president of the United States.

Therefore, we should carefully examine his first major foreign and military policy address — delivered on Oct. 7 at the Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina — and ponder the question: Is Mitt Romney ready for the world?

Romney began his speech with a heavy dose of fear. Iran, he warned, could well become “a fully activated nuclear weapons state, threatening its neighbors, [and] dominating the world’s oil supply.” Indeed, “Iran’s suicidal fanatics could blackmail the world.”

In Afghanistan, the Taliban might well “find a path back to power,” with the country sinking “back into the medieval terrors of fundamentalist rule.” Pakistan’s instability could end up placing nuclear weapons “in the hands of Islamic jihadists,” while “the malign socialism” of Venezuela and Cuba could “undermine the prospects of democracy” in Latin America.

Then, of course, there are the heavy dancers. China’s leaders could well take that nation down “a darker path, intimidating their neighbors, brushing aside an inferior American Navy in the Pacific, and building a global alliance of authoritarian states.”

“Wayne Madsen” – Next Stop is Pakistan

By Wayne Madsen

Global Research, October 10, 2011

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27013

Paraphrasing the old anti-Vietnam War song,

“And it’s one, two, three,

What are we fighting for ?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Pakistan”

It does appear that for some Pentagon brass, including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta; the CIA under former U.S. Central Command and Afghanistan commander General David Petraeus; and top Republican and Democratic politicians that, indeed, Pakistanis next on the target list of nations that will soon be feeling the military muscle of the United States. Unlike other Muslim nations that have been subjected to U.S. military intervention, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya, Pakistan’s ultimate prize for the West is its nuclear weapons arsenal…

A number of observers, including former senior figures with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, have made no secret of western contingency plans, which appear to be going active, to secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in order to eliminate the nation as a nuclear weapons power. The plans have been coordinated between the CIA, India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) intelligence service, and Israel’s Mossad.

“Robert Reich” – THE SEVEN BIGGEST ECONOMIC LIES

http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-SEVEN-BIGGEST-ECONOMIC-by-Robert-Reich-111011-432.html

October 11, 2011

By Robert Reich

The President’s Jobs Bill doesn’t have a chance in Congress — and the Occupiers on Wall Street and elsewhere can’t become a national movement for a more equitable society — unless more Americans know the truth about the economy.   

Here’s a short (2 minute 30 second) effort to rebut the seven biggest whoppers now being told by those who want to take America backwards. The major points:

1.  Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else. Baloney. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both sliced taxes on the rich and what happened? Most Americans’ wages (measured by the real median wage) began flattening under Reagan and have dropped since George W. Bush. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. 

“Michael Lind” – 6 Reasons Why Occupy Wall Street Protests Won’t Help Democrats

 

By Michael Lind, Salon
Posted on October 11, 2011, Printed on October 12, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/152693/6_reasons_why_occupy_wall_street_protests_won%27t_help_democrats

Can the Occupy Wall Street movement do for the Democrats what the Tea Party has done for the Republicans? Will a spontaneous grass-roots uprising against the rich neutralize the manipulated “Astroturf” Tea Party movement’s assault on big government, assure a second term for Barack Obama and lead to the new New Deal that progressives have been waiting for?

Alas, probably not. Ever since Richard Nixon won his reelection victory in 1972 by appealing to many of the discontented populists attracted to George Wallace, the Republican Party, formerly a party of big city boardroom types and small-town Rotarians, has been based at least in its rhetoric on right-wing populism. The Tea Party movement is merely an extreme exaggeration of the mainstream GOP.

But the Democrats since George McGovern captured the party’s presidential nomination in the same fateful year of 1972 have been the opposite of a left-wing populist party. Thus while right-wing populism reinforces the existing Republican story about America, any genuine left-wing populism would challenge the basic constituencies and values of the McGovern-to-Obama Democrats. There are six reasons in particular why Democrats are unlikely to benefit as much from populism as Republicans.