[Louis Proyect posted]: ``Why now, after five years since the onset of recession in late 2007, has the US economy stagnating and collapsed to virtually zero growth, once again? '
The answers to this are not all that difficult to understand. First, despite $13 trillion in free, no interest money given to banks, investors, and speculators by the US federal reserve for five years now, the banks still continue to dribble out lending to small-medium US businesses. No loans mean no investment mean no hiring mean no income growth for consumption, which is 70% of the economy. Similarly, large non-bank corporations continue to sit on more than $2 trillion in cash. Like the banks, they too refuse largely to invest in the US to create jobs, preferring hold the cash, or use it to buyback stock and pay shareholders more dividends, to invest it offshore, or to invest it in speculating with financial instruments like derivatives, foreign exchange, commodities futures, and the like.'' http://www.zcommunications.org/u-s-gdp-and-the-global-economic-slowdown-by-jack-rasmus Okay a rather long list of economists and political liberal-left comentators have been writing this same story since at least October 2008. It was and still is obvious giving money and regulatory breaks to banks and the rest of the financial sector doesn't work. How about in depth FBI, Treasury, and Justice department investigations and public reports followed by criminal cases, convictions, and jail time? Doesn't that sound a little more productive? Well it does to me. But the revolving door for foxes between hen house duties in regulatory agencies and free range profit hunting in the finance wilds...well so on and so forth. So why is the political and economic establishment in denial? Why do they still put out the same LA-LA-Land or worse prescriptions? The economic policies of the last thirty-five years have resulted in a slow grinding disaster that has ruined the underlying industrial and agricultural economy---as the establishment has been told over and over at least since Reagan. Doubling down on the same prescriptions has resulted in a speed up of the ruinous grind. Does buying political influence work? Well sure and it is vastly aided by Congressional rules that deliver chairmanships to those who can bring in the most money to national party organizations and their cottage industries of policy think tanks that dream up bogus solutions to the much more concrete envelop of major and minor ruins. Hence austerity, tax cuts on business, rises in consumer taxes and fees, and the whole panoply of economic blather. Max Baucus is the poster child for this systemic bribery and free market neoliberalism in standfast denial. So here we are... Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 'Twas sad as sad could be; And we did speak only to break The silence of the sea! All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon. Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
