So who is really to blame for the economic crap going on. I dont care if you post responses. Im curious as to what most think ..
Let me be first to blame a side. It's the republicans. The trillions the republicans have spent on wars, the trillion it cost by extending tax cuts for the rich, the billions spent on getting Obama for simply waking up in the morning, and the failure to approve any form of jobs bill. In fact, every time I ask what the republicans are for, I get an answer like "Liberty"... but theyk really don't know what that is. They just heard their friends say it. God, that felt good. Bee
For the economic crash, blame technology, it is the internet that absorbs absolutely every (US) job (and maybe poops out some in China). Why we love beating up ourselves with it? For that blame all US politicians and youself, since you voted them in even though you are not the highest bidder in Washington, the Insurance/Lending lobby is. But don't beat yourself too much, every country in the world consolidates in ~ 200 years after its foundation, and so it was about time then for us to go home now anyways. What COULD we do, if we had the culture, sophistication, and traditions to fix our problem? Well, for example we can take examples out of Europe and South East Asia such as Singapore, where they are introducing the 4-day work week to keep employment and individual buying power in pace with new tech's improved productivity. (Many Asian companies operate 4-day weeks de-facto already.) But this is beyond our brain power, we are Americans, and such examples will only make us think stuff like "why should US employers now start paying for one extra off day per week in addition to the already off Saturdays and Sundays". Face it we Americans contributed to the world what we contributed, and now we exit the stage to give way to the other people who are different and have the solutions naturally. Even the great British Empire exited to bow for American style freedom, and the Roman Empire exited to bow for Feudal style freedom. Now it is our turn to exit. I guess we must blame history. It is interesting actually, that we Americans loose starting with our closed borders, when every corporate operation goes in various foreign local currencies only to put the profits in US dollar accounts in the US. This way, it is only us Americans who will never have the bargaining power to devalue our currency to bring back some jobs. And then, individually, we are not even ready to go work in Asia en masse the same way as Asians used to come to work in the US en masse. Our feeling of our own White superiority is now starting to cost us.
I thought Kennedy was mostly responsible for Vietnam....and the Democrats voted for this last war..correct? You mean like when people are asked about the Dems, and they say,,''Cause the Democrats are for the poor'',,,LOL ''God that felt better.....''
Since you don't have "other", I will just post that it is progressives that have allowed our government to become so big they think they can determine how to steer the economy. The progressives live on BOTH sides of the aisle, and have their own agendas for growing government, and allowing the growth of the other side to stay.
I answered Bilderberg/CFR. The secret dealings that go on behind closed doors at their meetings pretty much suppress everybody and protect the interest of just a tiny handful of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. It isn't class warfare of the rich vs. the poor, but an oligarchy. Second choice would be social spending and the blame goes to both Democrats AND Republicans. Social security, health care, defense/war...those are all social spending schemes that both parties voted for.
Central planning has lured, bribed, threatened, sued and cajoled power away from the states....and thusly, further away from the people. Progressive leftism ardently subscribes to the continuation of such wholly unconstitutional notions.... do the math.
I say liberals are to blame for our current ecconomic state because they have blocked nuclear power. The US lack of energy policy is the MAIN reason we are where we are. The price of energy effects everything. The supplie of energy continues to drop as the demmand continues to increase. The ecconomy won't turn around till the prices of energy begin to drop.
CRA. Also failure to regulate Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac which Republicans were for and democrats against. Also, failure to regulate the derivatives markets. Also, bundling of home loans and the creation of subprime loans, and the pressure put on banks and lending institutions by the federal government to make risky loans to poor people who could not afford them.
Our wise, benevolent Central Planners thought it necessary and socially beneficial to economically engineer...completely independent of natural market forces... the "dream of home ownership". And here we are......witnessing leftist OWS protesters almost completely ignore federal government's deep and undeniable complicity in this irreversible mess.... to lay all blame at the feet of capitalism.
The blame goes on both sides with their policies and regulations. Government, more than anyone brought this economy down. It started with creating NAFTA and Free Trade without any minimum wage requirement or environmental laws for them and then put pressure on lending institutions to lend money for homes to people who couldn't afford it. Then they blew the lid off the whole economy by changing the law that held banks in check ever since the Great Depression, preventing banks from getting into risky derivatives and home loans and then failed to monitor them, knowing the risk in doing so. So if you want to put the blame where it really belongs, put it on your own government that so many seem to want to hand it all over to.
What if the Russians invaded? http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/02-2 America has always been a country with its full and fair share of flaws, but for quite some time during the middle part of the twentieth century, we got one thing reasonably right. There was a bargain then, between elites and the government and the public. According to the terms of the deal, the aristocracy would still be fantastically rich, but there would be limitations on their wealth, because some of that wealth, some substantial amount, needed to be shared with the working people and the middle class, and it was the role of government to make sure that that happened. Many among the well-to-do even shared that consensus. Since Ronald Reagan rode into town, however, that deal is off the table, replaced by what is essentially a new New Deal -- or, more accurately, simply the Bad Old Deal. Under the terms of this new/old arrangement, the unregulated wealthy grab absolutely everything they can get their hands on, the middle class scrambles for whatever bare existence it can maintain, and the rest of America, the working class and the poor, fall deeper and deeper into third world-style poverty. Under the terms of this new system, the role of the government is no longer to provide for the welfare of the people, nor to ensure that there are limitations on what the plutocracy can liberate from them. Under the terms of this new arrangement, the function of the government is simply to serve as a tool, assisting that plutocracy in depriving America's own people of everything that can be taken from them. That means that in the last thirty years we've entirely restructured the economy so that the super-wealthy have become obscenely-super-wealthy, and the middle class are lucky to have stood still, and haven't really even managed that. If one examines the destination of the considerable GDP growth that America has sustained over the last three decades, it's gone entirely to the richest of Americans. The middle class has actually lost ground. That's an astonishing fact, but think about it: Despite robust economic growth, workers today actually make less than they did back in the 1970s. Even more amazing, it wasn't that hard to pull off. All you had to do was to fool the people and divert their attention to other circuses to go along with the remaining crumbs of bread. Meanwhile, unions were decimated by changes in government policy. Jobs were exported -- first to the south, then to Mexico, then to China, now to Thailand or Vietnam, and probably soon to Africa -- in a never-ending search for the cheapest possible way to wring value out of the working people of the world, leaving Americans without any sort of remaining industry or economic base. If the Russians had come here and done this -- if they had come and stolen our resources, if they come and enslaved our children into inescapable soul-numbing jobs, if they had left us with environmental degradation and a wrecked economy and destroyed education system and a crumbling infrastructure and a sieve-like healthcare regime -- if the Russians had come and done any or all of this, we would've risen up in anger and hostility and patriotism and nationalism, and we'd have loaded up our weapons and killed every last one of them. But it wasn't the Russians that did it, it was our own overclass. And worse still, it was our own government acting as though they were protecting us from the evil bogeyman du jour, while in fact they were assisting the wealthy in bleeding us dry, until our anemia left us fit only for our profit-seeking hospitals. Think about how idiotic you have to be to allow yourself to be looted and not even realize the money's been taken out of your pocket. Think about how politically immature you have to be to allow a thief to walk right up to you, take your money, and not even recognize who that thief is. Think about how stupid you have to be to blame it on somebody else -- like gays, or Iraqis, or black helicopters -- and not pay attention to the real rip-off artist who's stealing your money. I would tip my hat in admiration to these plutocrats for the cleverness of their scheme -- even if a scam this ugly requires the predators to have the moral sensibility of an empty parking lot -- but in fact what they've done isn't really all that clever. The successes of their crimes have lots more to do with the fatuousness of their victims than with the acumen of the criminals. Worse yet, as if the American public hasn't already been stupid enough, here we are thirty years down the road from the advent of Reaganism, and we still don't get it. Here we are after three decades of being looted, still unable to figure out who's ripping us off. Here we are, even after the implausibly complete failures and disasters and depredations of the Bush administration, and most Americans are still unable to point to the criminals and their ideology, and identify the source of the crime. Which makes the future looked even more shaky. Now we have a president who most Americans are coming to believe is some sort of far-left Stalinist, while in fact he is every bit the full-measured facilitator of corporate parasitism that either George W. Bush or Bill Clinton were. And yet, because he is being made out to be some sort of outrageously decadent liberal, and because Americans are too dim to figure out the ruse, this president -- who is failing to address the concerns of ordinary Americans, most especially because he's not working for them in the least -- is bound to fail, and is looking increasingly like the proud owner of a one-term presidency. And what we can expect in reaction to that failure -- ironically and disastrously and jaw-droppingly idiotically -- is a sharp turn to the right. When Obama fails, it will be framed, as it already is being, as some sort of grand failure of liberalism. In fact, of course, just the opposite is true. It's a grand success of the overclass's looting of America. In this respect, Obama offers precious little "change", even from the crimes of George W. Bush. Look at his healthcare initiative, for example. I don't know about you, but I'd say it's a pretty safe bet that anything that the big pharmacological and big health insurance industries are in favor of is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster for the rest of us -- you know, we the people of the United States. This bill no more represents an initiative for the purpose of bringing healthcare to Americans than George Bush's prescription drug bill was an initiative to improve the life of seniors. In both cases, whatever vicarious and accidental improvements that exist are simply diversionary window-dressing on what is really another example of legalized corporate colonialism. In the case of Obama's healthcare legislation, what's happening is that enormous quantities of new customers are being forced to buy expensive health coverage from insurance industry predators who will be vastly enriched by means of this new legislation, which is precisely why they would favor something that ordinarily we would expect them to oppose, and that we certainly would expect them to oppose if Obama was any kind of progressive whatsoever, even if only in his personal fantasies. The bank bailouts were absolutely no different. What an amazing episode, what an amazing looting of the American public, what an amazing chapter in the destruction of an empire -- and all brought to us by a supposedly liberal president. In fact, Obama was simply extending the tradition of the Bush administration, and the Reagan ideology prior to that, which calls for pillaging the federal treasury in order to divert the maximal amount of money to economic elites, and then leaving the bill for the American taxpayer. One could go on and on from here. Obama continues to deploy more mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than there are uniformed American soldiers. He continues to support privatization of everything from American prisons to schools. He asks for the most tepid possible re-institution of regulations on the financial industry, and when the thieves on Wall Street growl back at him, he abandons even those most limited of obstacles to their worst impulses. The upshot is that today American voters have two choices. They can have the party that represents the maximal plundering of America, at the maximal speed. Or they can have the party that represents nearly the same crime at almost the same velocity. Either way, the United States has ceased in any meaningful way to be owned by citizens. Its voters vote, but their representatives in Congress and in the administration are beholden to economic elites, and act entirely accordingly. The country's institutions, infrastructure, and social relations are all being dismantled piece by piece and either relocated elsewhere or sold off in order to wring yet another drop of wealth out of the hides of working Americans, so that those who are already wealthy beyond belief can be even further enriched. If some other country did this to us -- if the Russians invaded and took all our resources, and enslaved us and our children to work in dismal jobs when we could find any work at all sufficient to maintaining a rapidly sinking middle class livelihood -- if those things happened and the perpetrator was a foreign power, we'd rise up and go to war and we'd kill every last one of em. But we're not doing any of that, even though a very real enemy has invaded this country and stripped it bare. In fact, this society is pretty busy making sure that we don't even notice who that enemy is. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/02-2
When you quote an article you should put it inside quotes. You should also put your own commentary on it, otherwise it is just plagerism.
Absolutely, it is the fault of central planning/ central banking/ and politics. It should be obvious that Congress is in no position to understand what the economy needs, let alone manage it better than it can manage itself.
Strange that Jews are included in the poll, why not Muslims, Chinese, Africans, Hindus, Arabs (since they control 50% of oil supplies), Iranians, etc. I blame, Muslims.
The financial sector tanked our economy with increasingly risky decisions. They'll continue to do so as long as we worship wealth.
Many people blame jews for everything that goes wrong so I mentioned them. I dont blame them though. Muslims suck for sure but our problems arent because of them. Not yet anyway.
