Probably one of the most influential jazz musicians, playing one of the influential jazz tunes of all-time.
I originally posted this several years ago. I would like to ask the guys at S&P to kiss a part of my anatomy but that’s not civilized. So, I’ll play a little music and let my blood pressure settle down.
Since S&P was an integral part of the fraud that was the mortgage bubble, I don’t see why the Department of Justice doesn’t take the gloves off. You downgrade us over some stupidness, then I’ll throw your butt in jail over helping to take down the country with willful mis-rating of mortgage securities.
Yesterday the Stock Market took a nosedive. Here’s what I know. US government spending equals 25% of GDP. Conservatives are cutting government spending. GDP will drop. The economy has to slow. So we take an already anemic economy and slow it even further. Maybe, just maybe, when the economy is slow, government spending is good?
Stock markets continued to slide Friday in Europe following sharp sell-offs in Asia and on Wall Street, as pessimism about weak growth in the United States combined with longstanding worries about debt levels in the euro area.
Futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 were also down, indicating another weak opening in New York.
Investors continued to pull funds away from stocks — including in emerging markets despite their solidly growing economies — and shifted instead into the perceived safety of assets like U.S. Treasury bonds, German bunds and precious metals. (more…)
Largest S&P 500 One Day Percentage Declines since 1950
Some people refuse to understand the facts that are right in front of them. Marvel Comics seems to be getting some backlash over their “new Spiderman.” The new Spiderman is a young man who is of Black-Latino descent. Some have decided that this backlash is because we still have a racial problem here in the United States. If you remember some of those multiple-choice college questions, the answer to this question is true, true and unrelated. It is true that there is a backlash against the new Spiderman and it is true that we still have a racial problem in the United States but these two things are not related. Spiderman is an American icon. It is hard to drastically alter an American icon without getting significant backlash. If Marvel comics wants to reach out to the Black community or the Latino community then they need to create a different character who is likable like Spiderman.
Hancock was a great character. But he was designed to be imperfect. He was designed to be an antihero. The American people embraced Hancock, the movie, brilliantly played by Will Smith. The film grossed over $150 million in the United States. It grossed over $650 million worldwide, including cable and DVD sales. America does have a racial problem, but we’re getting better. 30 years ago, a Black man playing a dysfunctional superhero would’ve been laughed out of the studio. Oh, and remember, in Hancock, Will Smith’s love interest was Charlize Theron, one of the most stunning white women on the planet. Come on! Just think if Sidney Poitier or Bill Cosby played in any movie in the 1960s or 1970s where they had a love interest of the caliber of Charlize Theron. As a society, we have changed. We are not the same as we were 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. Yet we still have racial problems in the United States. Anyway, my two cents.
As I mentioned yesterday, government spending makes up approximately 25% of our GDP. Cutting government spending equals losing jobs. Our unemployment rate is unacceptably high and, instead of creating jobs, Congress has just taking a big step toward losing more jobs. The GOP is killing America.
Michele Bachmann, in an absolutely brilliant paragraph, starts out by stating that she could not afford to buy a house on her own and needed government assistance. No big deal. Almost everybody has had some sort of government assistance with buying homes over the last 15 or 20 years. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have facilitated tens of millions of loans for average Americans. Then, Michele Bachmann pivoted and talked about how these agencies need to be eliminated. Therefore, as I see it, it appears to be okay for her to use government assistance to buy a house, but it’s not okay for you and me to do the same thing. I wonder if you could give her house back?
Remember when Republicans like Michele Bachmann were talking about how blacks were better off in slavery because they had both a mother and a father? Remember that? Well, here’s a thoughtful response.
Can somebody please explain to me why there is a fight over funding the FAA? For some reason, dating back to the Reagan years, the FAA has been a political football. It sure seems to me that if Republicans are serious about closing the deficit (and I don’t think that they are) they wouldn’t let an agency sit idle and let millions of dollars in revenue float off into the ether.
Why is Senator David Vitter still in the Senate? Wasn’t he in the DC Madam’s phone book? How did he win reelection? I’m still baffled by it. He is blocking a nomination to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior because it has become acceptable for senators to block nominations until their pet projects are funded. This is the kind of garbage that hurts America.
Speaking of hurting America, there is the NRA. The Obama administration is trying to work to control illegal guns getting into Mexican cartels. This would seem to be a good thing… unless you are the NRA. Then, you’re seriously mad about this affront to civil liberties. It would seem to me that we should do everything in our power to choke off the flow of guns to the Mexican cartels. If the NRA is upset, let them buy the guns and store them in a warehouse somewhere. The bottom line is we have to do whatever we can to stop that violence if it’s being fueled with American guns.
Please list this under the category of very stupid: Rep. Ron Paul has written a bill that will simply cancel $1.6 trillion in Federal Reserve debt. Yep. that should calm the markets. Let’s simply write off our debt. I’m sure that foreign governments and Wall Street will love that.
This has been a terribly depressing week from a political standpoint. Because of this, I need to put on something that makes me smile –
Dammit! I’m sorry, I don’t care what anybody says, being a progressive is ridiculously hard. We have leaders who pretend that we have no principles. We have leaders that don’t stand up to combat the craziness coming from conservatives on a daily basis. Who are these leaders? Who voted them in? Oh yeah, we did. Well, our “leadership” basically said to the progressive movement that we don’t care. We don’t care what it is that you think. We don’t care if you do represent the majority of Americans. All we want to do is bend over to the Republicans.
So, we’ve been wrangling with conservatives… No, that’s not right. We’ve been wrangling with the Tea Party for over a month. To be honest, negotiations started more than six months ago. We, the progressive movement, said that responsible deficit reduction should not take place until we had enough job growth. We said that reduction in federal spending would hurt the economy. We also mentioned that federal spending makes up approximately 25% of our GDP. Our fallback position was that we needed a balanced approach. We needed those who are enjoying the lowest taxes in over 40 years to simply pay their fair share. Nobody suggested we go back to a tax rate of 90% on the richest Americans. That’s a tax rate we had in this country as late as 1960 when John Kennedy took office. Remember that the 1960s and 1950s are a magical time for conservatives. They want to take us all back to that time frame when America was “right.”
With the mainstream media not wanting to be “too critical” of the Tea Party, we never got serious coverage of this ridiculous showdown. We never got ABC, NBC or CBS to dedicate a whole show to the stupidity of holding the American economy hostage. Sure, they had lead stories on it and they spent a good five or six minutes on the subject, but then they would quickly cut away to something that was completely and totally meaningless — like a skunk with its head in a Skippy jar. We never had any of the “serious” newscasters sit down with the American people and say that this was just unacceptable. We have one party basically stating that they’re going to hold their breath and not listen to anything that anyone else has to say until they get their way. That’s exactly what happened. On one side, we had the Democrats tripping all over themselves to say that they don’t support a measure that they ended up voting for. On the other side, we have Tea Party Republicans who are unhappy in spite of the fact they got everything they asked for. Let me say that again. The most conservative part of the Republican Party got everything that they asked for. They got trillions of dollars in spending cuts with no promise of revenue enhancements. None. Sure, there’s a bipartisan super Congress that is supposed to agree on $1 trillion worth of savings. Bipartisan. I’m really starting to hate this word because everything that seems to come out of these bipartisan commissions is overwhelmingly conservative in nature. It would be like progressives getting behind closed doors, being gagged and tied up in the corner, while the conservatives discuss whatever topic this commission is supposed to discuss. They only untie the progressives when it’s time for them to sign the document. I suspect they planned to get more conservative ideas about cutting essential programs and both houses of Congress would approve the insanity.
Again, from Congress we have smoke and mirrors. In theory this “crisis” came about because we need to raise the debt ceiling. Many deficit peacocks were worried about the deficit. So, they decided that the best thing to do would be to hold the economy hostage. Stupid parameters which are not related to real economic growth or job creation were placed in the way (for every dollar the debt ceiling is raised, we’ve cut the deficit by the same amount). Not one progressive was able to make a decent case throughout this months-long debate. The president’s “hit and run” strategy was a total failure. The president would make a speech with several excellent points, but didn’t follow up that speech with subsequent speeches around the country. Remember when the president had those great talking points about Republicans standing up for private jets and tax cuts for the rich? Where were those comments the last couple of days/weeks? Who stood up for the American people? The American people depend on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. These programs make up the backbone of our safety net. I’m sorry, I just did not see President Obama or other progressives in the House or Senate stand up and make a thoughtful case. This went on day after day, week after week. Yet, from the other side of the aisle, Republicans hammered their simplistic talking points. We’re spending too much. We have a spending problem. We heard this garbage over and over again.
I have no idea how this thing going to play out over the next 24/48 hours. I’ve called on the president to use the 14th amendment. After using the 14th amendment, he must submit legislation to Congress to eliminate the debt ceiling. If Congress wants to save money, holding our economy hostage is not the way to do it. Stop appropriating money. Congress has a line-item veto. They have the ability to save money. They have the ability to shut down programs.
The last several weeks have made me sick to my stomach. There is no real leadership in Washington. The president has simply been going along to get along. Democrats in both the House and the Senate have been toothless and spineless. It is almost as if we have no core values. There’s only been one obscure House member who has a name we can’t pronounce (Raúl Grijalva) who’s been standing up for the American people and our core values. Default is not an option. Flushing our safety net down the toilet so that multimillionaires can get larger tax breaks and more corporate jets is obscene.
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
