Austerity Coming! Wall Street Uprising NOW (Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest)

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From Kay in Maine we get some insight into why there is so little media coverage:

The Natives Are Getting Restless: Occupy Wall Street Continues!
(image found on Democracy Watchdog Action Network)

Where’s the “liberal media”? You would think the liberal media would be down there in NYC making sure every inch and hour of the Occupy Wall Street was recorded for the nation and the world to see, but so far, CRICKETS.

You see, there’s a rumor that has gone around for decades now that the media is liberal and we should not trust it. Liberal to me means the media is all about telling the truth, but yet, the natives are getting restless and they’re rising up against Wall Street, because the Wall Street whores have fucked over America and the world (they’ve given America & the world a venereal disease!), and we have to go to Facebook to find out the latest on these protests!

Seriously, what is wrong with this picture?????

When liberals protest Wall Street, they get arrested…



. . . but when the lame-o tea bags protest anything, they get non-stop 24/7 media coverage and a ton of respect!

Eighty people arrested so far for Occupying Wall Street.

Isn’t that great? Oh, but it’s okay for a tea bag to bring a loaded fucking gun to greet President Obama with at a protest rally!

What is going on here? I think we all know the truth: THE LAMESTREAM MEDIA IS RIGHT WING! Always has been. Remember when Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky were rolling around between the sheets? Non-stop coverage by the media!

Remember when George Bush lied America into an illegal war with Iraq based on fake/fraudulent/forged evidence? No investigations done by the media to stop this illegal war!
See the difference? I do.

On my Facebook page I recently asked this, “Where’s the tea party? I thought they were all about truth and justice? Ha! You couldn’t find one dried up tea bag at these protests because they side with the Billionaire Koch Brothers and the wealthy hedge fund manager who started the tea party movement. See?” 

. . . and the one and only response I got from one of the teabaggers on my Facebook was, “because it doesn’t matter”.

Wha? It doesn’t matter??? IT DOESN’T MATTER??????? WTF! Seriously, the tea bag party is about as useful as a piano is in catching a fish!

What is the lamestream media afraid of? Why aren’t they covering these protests 24/7? Is it because they’re in the fucking bag with the billionaire Nazis of America and don’t want Americans to truly understand of what these assholes have done to our nation and the world?

You betcha!

ARREST THE FUCKING HEDGE FUND MANAGERS, THE BANKERS, THE WALL STREET INSIDERS, THE OIL SPECULATORS…………..but don’t arrest the Americans who are trying to bring their crimes to the surface!

Oh, and media? START COVERING THE REAL AMERICA PLEASE!

(Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Paul Krugman

You gotta give Paul Krugman props for taking the idiot's abuse and continuing down the path of reason and restraint in the face of fools' nonstop adversity.

This week President Obama said the obvious: that wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes, should bear part of the cost of reducing the long-run budget deficit. And Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan responded with shrieks of “class warfare.”

It was, of course, nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it’s people like Mr. Ryan, who want to exempt the very rich from bearing any of the burden of making our finances sustainable, who are waging class war.

As background, it helps to know what has been happening to incomes over the past three decades. Detailed estimates from the Congressional Budget Office — which only go up to 2005, but the basic picture surely hasn’t changed — show that between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent. No, that isn’t a misprint. In 2005 dollars, the average annual income of that group rose from $4.2 million to $24.3 million.

So do the wealthy look to you like the victims of class warfare?

And on the "No Soup For You!" Austerity front?

Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects.

Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated by calls for fiscal austerity. By slashing spending and reducing deficits, we were told, nations could restore confidence and drive economic revival.

And the austerity has been real. In Europe, troubled nations like Greece and Ireland have imposed savage cuts, even as stronger nations have imposed milder austerity programs of their own. In the United States, the modest federal stimulus of 2009 has faded out, while state and local governments have slashed their budgets, so that over all we’ve had a de facto move toward austerity not so different from Europe’s.

Strange to say, however, confidence hasn’t surged. Somehow, businesses and consumers seem much more concerned about the lack of customers and jobs, respectively, than they are reassured by the fiscal righteousness of their governments. And growth seems to be stalling, while unemployment remains disastrously high on both sides of the Atlantic.

But, say apologists for the bad results so far, shouldn’t we be focused on the long run rather than short-run pain? Actually, no: the economy needs real help now, not hypothetical payoffs a decade from now. In any case, evidence is starting to emerge that the economy’s “short run” troubles — now in their fourth year, and being made worse by the focus on austerity — are taking a toll on its long-run prospects as well.

Consider, in particular, what is happening to America’s manufacturing base. In normal times manufacturing capacity rises 2 or 3 percent every year. But faced with a persistently weak economy, industry has been reducing, not increasing, its productive capacity. At this point, according to Federal Reserve estimates, manufacturing capacity is almost 5 percent lower than it was in December 2007.

What this means is that if and when a real recovery finally gets going, the economy will run into capacity constraints and production bottlenecks much sooner than it should. That is, the weak economy, which is partly the result of budget-cutting, is hurting the future as well as the present.

Furthermore, the decline in manufacturing capacity is probably only the beginning of the bad news. Similar cuts in capacity will probably take place in the service sector — indeed, they may already be taking place. And with long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression, there is a real risk that many of the unemployed will come to be seen as unemployable.

Oh, and the brunt of those cuts in public spending is falling on education. Somehow, laying off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers doesn’t seem like a good way to win the future.

In fact, when you combine the growing evidence that fiscal austerity is reducing our future prospects with the very low interest rates on U.S. government debt, it’s hard to avoid a startling conclusion: budget austerity may well be counterproductive even from a purely fiscal point of view, because lower future growth means lower tax receipts.

What should be happening? The answer is that we need a major push to get the economy moving, not at some future date, but right now. For the time being we need more, not less, government spending, supported by aggressively expansionary policies from the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad. And it’s not just pointy-headed economists saying this; business leaders like Google’s Eric Schmidt are saying the same thing, and the bond market, by buying U.S. debt at such low interest rates, is in effect pleading for a more expansionary policy.

And one more truly resonant essay spoke to me recently.

Welcome to Boston, Mr. Rumsfeld. You Are Under Arrest

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