More FDR please.

[Octafish]

Less welfare for Wall Street and trickle down austerity for the 99%.

[uponit7771]

1. We need an 83% progressive congress like FDR had. No president in this country has gotten a free pas

...and without congressional support they're hands are tied.

That's a consistent and maybe a good thing

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

6. Thank you! I'm so sick of hearing liberals make the false comparison

between Obama-FDR, Obama-JFK, Obama-LBJ. It is intellectually dishonest and historicallly and factually wrong. All three Democratic presidents enjoyed an overwhelming number of Democrats in both houses. Those Democrats were proud progressives, not to mention a large number of moderate Republicans. Obama does not enjoy that type of majority. He never did!

Thanks again!

[TheWraith]

8. Not to mention, FDR was regarded by liberals as a sellout as well.

Too kind on big business and not radical enough. Social Security, when originally passed, was derided as a half-measure of reform that would leave too many people out--a lot like healthcare reform. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. It's no coincidence that FDR is regarded so well because time has allowed people to forget the intemperate whining and see the value of what he did.

[Octafish]

7. There's a lot that can be done. For starters, select an economic team with integrity.

People respect honesty, especially if they can check the books.

Obama's Biggest Mistake: Selling Out to the Bankers

The original sin of Obama's presidency was to trust bank-friendly economists and Bush carryovers, whose primary goal was to protect their own past decisions and futures.

New Deal 2.0 / By James K. Galbraith
November 7, 2010

EXCERPT...

But one cannot defend the actions of Team Obama on taking office. Law, policy and politics all pointed in one direction: turn the systemically dangerous banks over to Sheila Bair and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Insure the depositors, replace the management, fire the lobbyists, audit the books, prosecute the frauds, and restructure and downsize the institutions. The financial system would have been cleaned up. And the big bankers would have been beaten as a political force.

Team Obama did none of these things. Instead they announced “stress tests,” plainly designed so as to obscure the banks’ true condition. They pressured the Federal Accounting Standards Board to permit the banks to ignore the market value of their toxic assets. Management stayed in place. They prosecuted no one. The Fed cut the cost of funds to zero. The President justified all this by repeating, many times, that the goal of policy was “to get credit flowing again.”

SNIP...

These facts were obvious to everybody, fueling rage at “bailouts.” They also underlie the economy’s failure to create jobs. What usually happens (and did, for example, in 1994 - 2000) is that credit growth takes over from Keynesian fiscal expansion. Armed with credit, businesses expand, and with higher incomes, public deficits decline. This cannot happen if the financial sector isn’t working.

Geithner, Summers and Bernanke should have known this. One can be fairly sure that they did know it. But Geithner and Bernanke had cast their lots, with continuity and coverup. And Summers, with his own record of deregulation, could hardly have complained.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story/148770/obama%27s_biggest_mistake%3A_selling_out_to_the_bankers

Politically speaking, one would be amazed at what an economy based on justice, not just-us, would do at the polls.

[lumpy]

2. Wonderful picture. Can you give some background info on it ?

nt

[jwirr]

3. Kind of like "Can you spare me a dime".

[Octafish]

4. It's Derby Day.

King George V, two chums and a beggar, 1920.

[Robb]

5. "Beggar runs alongside King George V's coach, 1920."

[Octafish]

9. Why the Rich Are Getting Richer

From the CFR people:

Why the Rich Are Getting Richer

American Politics and the Second Gilded Age

By Robert C. Lieberman
Foreign Affairs
January/February 2011

The U.S. economy appears to be coming apart at the seams. Unemployment remains at nearly ten percent, the highest level in almost 30 years; foreclosures have forced millions of Americans out of their homes; and real incomes have fallen faster and further than at any time since the Great Depression. Many of those laid off fear that the jobs they have lost -- the secure, often unionized, industrial jobs that provided wealth, security, and opportunity -- will never return. They are probably right.

And yet a curious thing has happened in the midst of all this misery. The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else's income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

This is what the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call the "winner-take-all economy." It is not a picture of a healthy society. Such a level of economic inequality, not seen in the United States since the eve of the Great Depression, bespeaks a political economy in which the financial rewards are increasingly concentrated among a tiny elite and whose risks are borne by an increasingly exposed and unprotected middle class. Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. It breeds political polarization, mistrust, and resentment between the haves and the have-nots and tends to distort the workings of a democratic political system in which money increasingly confers political voice and power.

It is generally presumed that economic forces alone are responsible for this astonishing concentration of wealth. Technological changes, particularly the information revolution, have transformed the economy, making workers more productive and placing a premium on intellectual, rather than manual, labor. Simultaneously, the rise of global markets -- itself accelerated by information technology -- has hollowed out the once dominant U.S. manufacturing sector and reoriented the U.S. economy toward the service sector. The service economy also rewards the educated, with high-paying professional jobs in finance, health care, and information technology. At the low end, however, jobs in the service economy are concentrated in retail sales and entertainment, where salaries are low, unions are weak, and workers are expendable.

CONTINUED...

Article: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67046/robert-c-lieberman/why-the-rich-are-getting-richer#

Now if Rockefeller's peeps are noticing, the problems must be getting obvious.