On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:18:56 -0800, Hawke
wrote:

On 1/1/2011 2:35 PM, Larry Jaques wrote:
RCM only

On Sat, 01 Jan 2011 11:41:52 -0600, Boris Kapusta
wrote:

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has set his New Year's resolution
high for 2011: repair the struggling economy.

In his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, the vacationing
president said recent data showed the economic recovery was gaining
traction even as millions of Americans are still out of work.

"Our most important task now is to keep that recovery going," Obama
said. "As president, that's my commitment to you: to do everything I
can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and
strengthening our middle class. That's my resolution for the coming
year."

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7000NB20110101

Anyone want to bet he pulls a Douchebag and drops the ball again for
the third year in a row?...

Note how he's saying "Republicans are ready to lead..."? It appears
that he's trying to set up the REP party to take the blame for
whatever else he pulls in the near future.

Nobody needs to set up the republican party to take the blame for
anything. They're perfectly capable of making a mess all by themselves.
Just like the one we're still trying to get out of. All we will see now
is just more republican screw ups. Don't blink. It doesn't take them but
a second to ruin things. I just wonder why people keep giving them
another chance. It must be that America has battered woman syndrome.
They keep putting the party that beats the **** out of them back where
they can do it again.

Hawke
==========
I think a better simile is a generation long Ponzi scheme,
where the insiders make out like a bandit, and the majority
investors get it in the shorts when it comes time to
actually deliver those promised outsized returns in actual
cash. The rationale is that they just need to invest a
little more money and then everything will be fine.

The "Republican" grift is very appealing, stolen as it was
from actual Republicans such Taft and Goldwater, that taxes
and regulations can and should be minimized by limiting the
size of government, and by combating [wait for it] fraud,
waste and abuse. The problem of course is that in a spirit
of bipartisanship, government has grown enormously, not
shrunk, fraud, waste and abuse are so rampant that these are
no longer recognized as such, and the Republican campaign
contributors are addicted to the Federal tit, albeit at a
higher aggregate level such as entire weapons systems
contracts.

The "Democratic" grift is very similar in that it promises
increasing social services and safety nets, again to be paid
for by increasing enforcement against Fraud, waste abuse,
and tax evasion, with no increase in taxes. The Democratic
campaign contributors and voters are equally addicted to the
federal tit, but many of these are at a lower
[subsistence/cheese check] level.

The entire established economic mantra of the last
generation from deregulation and the new knowledge based
economy to free trade and supply side economics is as much
bourgeois bafflegas/BS as Madoff's "split strike
conversion."

It should be apparent that as long as the executives on Wall
Street and the transnational corporations including the
banks are allowed, indeed encouraged, aided and abetted, to
skim the profits off the top and pay minimal to no taxes
[but large political campaign contributions], the US economy
will not and cannot improve. It should also be apparent
that such massive skimming and tax evasion requires
extensive bipartisan support including the top levels of the
DoJ and IRS, so the replacement of a blue scoundrel with a
red scoundrel will change nothing.

As long as the voters keep believing the popular myths,
legends, folklore, magic spells, incantations and oral
traditions pumped out by both political parties and the
political pendants, nothing is going to change, but then no
one wants to know the truth about Santa Claus either.


-- Unka George (George McDuffee)
...............................
The past is a foreign country;
they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author.
The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).