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401k was devised to bring blue collar workers into a Wall Street sphere of influence. Where, before the 401k, the average worker saw Wall Street machinations from afar and could not empathize with its conservative profiteering. With the 401k came a merging of social conservative ethos and real economic conservative politicking. It put many hard working Americans in the conservative corner, drawing off their votes and making them turn their backs on their own economic interests.
And now here are.
"Chuckle", my cynicism extends to women as well, thanks to the Margaret Thatchers, Hillary Clintons and Sarah Palins of the world. I can think of a long list of male politicians I'd pick before any of those get my vote.
Kend, once again I'm in shock. You've said something else I actually agree with! That first paragraph about Afghanistan was right on. However I have a very hard time believing the Mexicans "love" NAFTA, since NAFTA trashed their economy. This is why we've had so many of them immigrating here looking for work!
10-K, how do you figure we can "force" this corporate "media" to cover anything of consequence to us, like mass demonstrations in the streets? We don't really have a media anymore; just a lying propaganda noise machine for the oligarchs.
I'm glad we don't have TV, because frankly, I don't believe I could have stomached Obama's platitudes about economic equality and jobs and so on, knowing his intentions with the TPP. Anyone into so-called "free trade" is NOT pro-worker. I love Marc's analogy about sticking a wad of chewing gum in a leaking dam. (Great to have ya back, Marc ole buddy!!)
I agree, DrRichard, Roosevelt was a very mixed bag. Besides his abusive treatment of Japanese AMERICANS (not to mention his neglect of African Americans), he refused to give European Jews asylum from Hitler's racist, murderous rampage; he slammed the door in their faces, thus throwing them to the wolves. It would have been very easy for U.S. forces to bomb Germany's railroad tracks leading to & from the death camps, which they failed to do, blowing off another opportunity to save countless innocents from a cruel fate. I believe Eleanor Roosevelt would have made a better, and way more compassionate, president. - Aliceinwonderland
Kend ~ Free trade is the number one domino. Nothing else productive can happen until it falls. If the TPP is passed we can forget about any other meaningful change happening. That would be the last nail in the American coffin of despair and poverty for all.
Elioflight -- Most business people are like your uncle. The problem is that private equity firms like Bain capital just buy them out.
Elioflight -- I thought everyone saw it has unConstitutional. Even Obama in his previous SOTU called it unConstitutional.
Ozzy scott -- The dems can even get a bill passed to stop giving tax incentives to ship jobs overseas. It was filibustered in the senate by every repug and no dem. It seems that tariffs have always worked. Why not use tariffs? Actually, tariffs are now being applied but they are in the 2%. We need to change them back to the values they have been for 200 years until raygun came along -- typically, they were around 20%.
DAnne I am not sure about free trade. i think it is because I don't know much about it. i do know Americans don't like it and no one in Canada likes it and the Mexicans love it. I guess we know the winner of NAFTA. On the other hand a closed economy kind of scares me. Living in Canada a country that is loaded with every resource in the world I guess we need free trade. I am not sure what it could possibly do for the US.
On a lighter note without free trade you might not of got Justin Bieber from Canada LOL. Please don't deport him. We don't want either. But we could use his millions in tax revenue.
FDR had overwhelming majority of dems in each house. FDR had no citizens united.
ckrob -- My main fault with Obama is his naivete not his heart. One prime example is not asking for the resignation papers from every US Attorney, as every prez before had done.
Dw---003 -- Did not Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Protection bill raise capital requirements? After which the repugs got control of the house. It seems that they lost house because people, like Thom, on election day 2010 pointed out how wimpy that consumer protection bill was. I think a lot of dems stayed home on voting day because they got the impression that the dems and repugs were the same.
Democrats already decided the next election. Bill Clinton targeted the very poor, giving us 8 years of Bush. While lib media remained oblivious to this point, most of the poor and those of us who care about the growth of severe poverty in the US, withheld our votes, unable to vote for another anti-poor Democrat. Once again, Democrats target the poor, slashing food aid for the elderly, disabled and poor. Hard to get much lower than that. As I understand it, they decided to cut $90 from the average $110 allotment. This already guaranteed that the administration will be Republican, as we withhold our votes in the next election. The Republicans know it. Lib media knows it. Keep this in mind as the campaign fund-raising campaigns go into full swing.
Good advice on mutual funds, but be careful if you get into too many. They may own virtually the same stocks and then you're paying multiple times for the same management.
Was Roosevelt have been the same? In my mind yes and no. The obscene treatment of Japanese Americans was certainly massive detention, on the other hand when the opportunity arose to kill Admiral Yamamoto the US government actually asked clergymen if this was ethical. (They said it was.) The massive firebombings of Germany and Japan were way beyond any use of drones, but it was a different war. In any case, I believe FDR would have controlled the NSA, CIA and the like far better than Obama has done. No president is perfect, and maybe we expect too much from them, but Roosevelt knew how to get things done. He could be backstabbing and manipulative, but really followed through on helping those in serious trouble. Obama cares, but when push comes to shove likely as not he'll passively go along with the good old boys.
Kend ~ Very good points! However, if you read what I added to AIW's post you would see the real main problem. Obama should have set out to repeal free trade and reinstate high import tariffs on foreign goods when he took office. Without that everything else he did is just smoke and mirrors... the same as putting a chunk of chewing gum in a leaking dam. Mind you, some very expensive gum. What a shame when the gum costs more than the dam. Until I hear Obama sing the songs I'm waiting to hear there is no way in hell I'm jumping on any Obama or Democratic Party bandwagon to nowhere. If you ask me this whole last SOTU was nothing more than to muster Democratic support for the next midterm.
"We need to do what the Tea Party did and start taking over local political bodies like precinct committees." ...and might I add, get our butts back into the streets and force the media to broadcast images of everyday working class citizens getting tear gassed and arrested by the thousands. Then, and only then, will things change....in my opinion......without a lot of death.
Often the spam is not aimed at us at all. What they want to do is have as many different sites/pages pointing at their site at the same time, so that Google thinks it is a very popular site and puts it at or near the top of the list when somebody is searching for, say, Ugg boots. SInce their immediate target audience is the Google bot and its ilk,it does not matter to them necessarily if their message is a load of rubbish and/or of no interest to anyone on the forum.
And while we now have quite a few traps to catch many of them for us these days, so not a lot gets through, in the past I sometimes had to delete literally 100s of spam posts a day manually. And while they generally did the actual post manually, they had more or less automated creation of loads of accounts to post them with, and the word/phrase filter was sometimes the only way to stop them signing in and posting more spam for the same product faster than I could find and delete the posts and ban the accounts. I think you would soon have got fed up wading past them. Some discussions had far more spam than genuine posts.
Strange. If you had been really unlucky and used another filter word in your post, that would have shown up in the report if you tried to post it without Buggs. So, unless you used another word that had uggs in, then I am baffled.
Alice you forgot to mention the 35,000 troops he sent to Afganistan and maybe the five or six trillion he spent that didn't create any jobs or fix any infrastructue.
I don't understand the US system. Why do you elect a congress if the president can make law with a excutive order. How is that possible? Deosn't the President need congresses approval? If it is possible why bother electing a congress. i thought congress was there to represent the people, the everyday gal or guy.
Your sentence - "Except for a brief period during his first year in office when he pushed through healthcare reform and financial reform, President Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything." - is hyperbole. He has accomplished a great deal, not only in hard political victories, but also finessing and implementing progressive political strategy. But I agree much more would have gotten done with a Republican party that wasn't so crazy. But when you extend your hand to a closed fist, what's a person to do? And for the record, while I do think that a lot of the wish to see the president fail is because he's African American, from the Clinton years I can only assume it will be this way under every Democratic president.
Except for a brief period during his first year in office when he pushed through healthcare reform and financial reform, President Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything. - See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/01/republican-conspiracy-has-worked#comment-formPresident Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything. - See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/01/republican-conspiracy-has-worked#sthash.WUtXNDvk.dpufPresident Obama hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything. - See more at: http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/01/republican-conspiracy-has-worked#sthash.WUtXNDvk.dpuf
Palindromedary ~ Point well taken. The old saying, "a watched pot never boils," comes to mind when thinking of stocks. Playing the stock market on your own is very risky business. However, investing in reputable mutual funds over the long haul is a very lucrative approach. Of course, most Americans are too much into instant gratification to have the patients for such endeavours. Also, like you said, most Americans don't have the capital laying around to invest. I don't trust 401K's any more than you do. What I would suggest is to take that spare change and invest it yourself in a reputable mutual fund. Diverging with several funds isn't a bad idea either--if you can afford it. Then pretend it doesn't exist. Long haul here means 10 + years. It'll go up and go down. What you are betting on is that in the long haul it will go up. Meanwhile by owning your own account you retain complete control over it in the event you might need it sooner than expected; or, some disaster looms in the horizon.
Myra, (oh, excuse me: MyRA) another one of Obama's boondoggles of ill repute. I hadn't even heard about this until I heard Thom Hartmann talked about it on his program today. No, I didn't watch the SOTU speech...just more political marketing hype.
How can Americans save when, even if they are lucky enough to still have jobs, their jobs no longer pay enough to allow saving?
I consider myself lucky that I got out of the 401k scam before I lost it all. And the kicker, as Thom mentioned, was that after accumulating $15,000, it all gets shoved into a Roth IRA. Wall Street is not going to let you keep all that money! They'll finagle some other scam before you are able to collect.
The Business Week article belittles the Obama plan from the standpoint that the savings will actually not earn enough interest to even match inflation. But the real problem is not that you might not match inflation and loose a little over time (if you don't play the casino capitalism game). The real problem is that after spending a lifetime of saving your pennies, when you go to retire, Wall Street will rip you off...because they control your money...you don't. Until Wall Street and the banks are tightly regulated and regulation tightly enforced there is no reason to risk your money in that game. And the game is rigged in favor of high-speed traders.*
I think that Myra is just another sell-out to the capitalist pigs... as was Obamacare. Both are ways to delude people into losing all their money to the mafia-like finaglers and manipulators.
State of the Union
Can Obama's myRA Retirement Plan Get Americans to Save?
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-30/can-obamas-myra-retireme...
Keep up the good work, Mr. Hartmann! Keep keeping us informed of Republican and Faux-Democrat shenanigans.
*Comment by a trader on trading stocks...
"Historically, from the data I've studied, it has not been a particularly clever idea for a really long time...stocks in the U.S. in just the last 10 years has had two distinct declines of just north of 50%. So to make 5% a year, you are risking half your money. That, to me, is an awful trade. I don't make it."
Eric Hunsader-data analyst
"I lost faith in capitalism..at least what we had built...I didn't trust it anymore."
0+ Scalping Strategy
--------------
On Dark Pools...
"...the stock market—the United States stock market—was rigged. Exchanges appeared to be providing mechanisms to favored clients that allowed them to circumvent Reg NMS rules in ways that abused regular investors. It was complicated, a fact that helped hide the abuses, just as giant banks used complex mortgage trades to bilk clients out of billions, in the process triggering a global financial panic in 2008. Bodek** wasn’t sure if it was an outright conspiracy or simply an ecosystem that had evolved to protect a single type of organism that had become critical to the survival of the pools themselves."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/dark-pool-truth-about-what-really-goes-sto... 4 parts
**Heim Bodek ..blowing the whistle on the unfair advantage of HFT (High Frequency Trades) and trades done behind the scenes and out of reach of ordinary investors.
http://haimbodek.com/
When I tried to repost a comment that had been caught in the filter, it got caught again and all subsequent posts were caught and even on other day's topics or pother daily blogs if I went to them immediately after trying to repost. On the daily blog I was initially turned back from I could never post again, with or without "Bugs Bunny". Usually I got the form to fill out to explain why my post isn't spam (which seemed to get the circular file) but other times I was simply told I was not authorized to post.
BTW, I just now got caught in the spam filter again because I used my original spelling of Bugs Bunny. When I changed it it went through.
I had a problem with the fuel level being erratic and showing incorrect fuel levels in my vehicle and suspected the fuel level sender in the gas tank. I pulled it out and saw the problem right away. The double sliding variable resistor..potentiometer had one tiny little brush that had worn away and was not making good contact with the slide surface. I even verified that was the problem with an ohm-meter.
I went to the auto supply store for a part...they said I would have to buy the whole fuel pump assembly at $299. I said "never mind!" He said "but it's guaranteed for the life of the vehicle!". Yeah, right!
So, anyway I fixed the part myself by pressing out the plastic float swivel to gain access to the two brushes and then bent the little contact finger more so that it makes contact with the slider surface. It works just fine now...and I saved over $300. And that was just for a part from a non-dealer. That part would have been a lot more at a dealer and they would have charged for labor too.
The point being that these merchants believe that we are all a bunch of ninnies who are so helpless and dumb enough to be suckered in by sales hype (like "guaranteed for the life..") that we will easily part with our money.
And that "guaranteed for life", if you read the small print, doesn't mean what most people are led to believe it means. It's just a marketing gimmick.
Aliceinwonderland ~ You took the words right out of my mouth. The only thing I would add is why bother trying to get this man to do anything? It seems the only things he tries to do are meager at best and surely bound to fail. Yet he never tries to do anything substantial; such as, repeal free trade, push for an amendment to overturn Citizens United, or even advocate vigorous Campaign Finance Reform. It would appear to me that the peanuts he has asked for so far should be obtained with executive orders without problems. The only problem will be the Repubs who will explode in outrage over the issue. Let them, I say. Perhaps that would lay the groundwork for more substantial issues to be addressed before the end of his final term. I'm not going to hold my breath.
With the exception of the recent spam filter flag, I believe that the spam filter on this web site has worked very well. After the several years that I have posted here, this was really the only time that I've been flagged. I've seen other blog web sites that were plagued with spammers. In which case my own internal spam blocker goes into effect...I skip right over them like my mind blanks out when I detect commercials on TV or in the Movies. Are there really readers out there who would be taken in by this unwanted commercial advertising that it would make it worth it for a spammer to even bother?