fahrender

4 Dividend Stocks to Hedge Against Social Security Failure

The people who are grumbling about Social Security are the same bunch who have been trying to kill it since the 1930's. They want it to die because they hate paying even one penny to the poor and the destitute and some of us other peons who've managed only to make it from pay check to pay check most of our lives.
The people who've demanded lower taxes and are too stingy to fund education in a meaningful way have not brought about a more stable and prosperous nation. Big corporations and especially big, greedy, financial organizations are the ones who crashed our economy. Wall Street is culprit number one, hand in hand with their political cronies and enablers. George W. Bush went for "guns and butter" even bigger than Lyndon Johnson did. That is another black hole, still unresolved, that is draining our resources.
A real health care program with a public option, even better a single payer program will help our economy not wreck it, and it's the same, selfish crowd, big business and wealthy politicians who are, in fact, not doing the people's will, it's these same people who are bad mouthing Social Security.

What role do America's lazy pupils and grossly underachieving school system play in shaping the economy? "They still find it hard to believe that all those Chinese students, beavering away at their books, will steal their children's jobs." (The Economist)

as a teacher who has worked in five different countries, most of my fifty year "career" however in the US, i can say from first hand experience that where there is strong, genuine interest in the education of children students do well. But, for schools to do well there must be adequate funding and the respect of teachers and teaching by both the general public and the politicians who control the purse strings. in too many countries, and in the US and the UK in particular, the politicians and more than a few public figures decide that schools should have certain priorities which are then inadequately funded or not funded at all. teachers and schools are blamed for problems which are societal and cultural.
i find particularly contemptible the people who natter on about "throwing money" at the problem as if teachers are paid enough or classes are small enough or libraries and laboratories are properly equipped, or arts programs are even funded at all. these hypocrites fuss and fume about how rotten the educational system in the US is but they aren't prepared to do what is necessary for this country to have a good education system. instead we have pompous finger wagging about long summer vacations or some such "issue" which might have a minor relevance but in no way is critical to deal with the central issues.
American schools are not all the same. some of them are quite good. guess where they are: in communities that have the where with all to pay for them and are willing to do so.
one final comment: as long as we have communities and subcultures that refuse to accept the theory of evolution, as long as this farcical phenomenon exists, even though it isn't prevalent and even though it is just a single issue, as long as Americans are willing to put up with this nonsense we shouldn't wonder too much why our schools aren't doing a better job.

GE's Immelt Thinks for Himself: U.S. Not Shifting to a Service Economy

sacrificing the environment in order to be "competitive" in manufacturing is not an option. we've already been doing for it the past 100 years or more. it's a lousy excuse for destroying the livability of the planet. it's the same lousy excuse the Bush Administration used for the past eight years.
polar ice has already diminished at a shocking rate. the swamping of US coastal cities will be a catastrophe the likes of which we have never experienced.

President Obama's Effect on the Market

"there's a difference between buying a house and buying a house on fire." - Jamie Dimond

The American economy was already "on fire" long before Obama was elected.
Wall Street and big corporations begged the government to do something.
The American voters emphatically rejected Republican policies in November 2008.
Barack Obama has been in office less than two months.

Am I happy with what Obama has done to date?

No. But,I do not blame him for the way things are on March 11, 2009.

I'm not a big fan of socialism either, but slash-and-burn-neocon-... got us where we are today and it sucks. lost %50 of the value of your portfolio or house? tough. you live in a capitalist country where all of the safeguards which would have at least minimized this mess were hacked away due to the bullying influence of corporate lobbyists.

unfettered capitalism has done this to America more than once, but the greedy and the powerful don't really care because they'll get by no matter what.

Obama will probably stumble through this mess one way or another. It will not be pretty. The Republicans and their leaders Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby and Rush Limbaugh and John Boehner are doing everything they can to poison the waters. Their patriotism is very suspect.

4 Signs That the Market Has Hit Bottom

i believe that any kind of bottom over the next year to year and a half, local or otherwise, will crumble within months. my prediction is for prolonged misery alleviated by periodic rallies.

The Rally, When It Comes, Will Be a Doozy

lefties have.... little aptitude for math, like Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman you mean? or John Kenneth Galbraith?
the neo-conservatives lead us right into this mess. what was with their math skills? they were all for tax cuts and going to war. doesn't work, guns and butter, for Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush.

as for being liars, it's a common trait of both lefties and righties. few people of any political persuasion are bigger liars than Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom DeLay, Phil Gramm, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or Sarah Palin. These people are world class expert liars. they have lied even in the face of video tapes proving their lies. that is the true test of an olympic class liar. all of them passed this test with flying colors. most of them more than once.

as for the poor capitalist business owner who "loses everything" while the (greedy? selfish?) workers get to "keep" what they made. what. total. hog. wash.
the capitalist business owner has his stashed away in an offshore bank. the worker (real wages have fallen considerably over the past 30 years) has scraped by until he got "down-sized" by the capitalist business owner long before the business went under.
as for your math, i was one of those people earning the average wage of $3,855.80 a year in 1959. i'm 72 now and after fifty years on the job i'm pulling right at $50,000. $50,000 today buys very little more than $4,000 did in 1959. i know. i was there and i've got the bills to prove it.
in the intervening years i've improved my skills, gotten a master's degree and done additional professional training and my life style is now pretty much the same as it was then. that's o.k. with me. i'm doing what i want to do. but, there are a lot of Americans who have gotten screwed, repeatedly, and the American worker is at the top of the list.
you used the term "the masses"! uh oh, that socialist lingo is even creeping into your vocabulary. as for keeping them poor and stupid, BillO, Fox News and Oxycontin Rush are the premier snake oil salesmen for the poor and stupid.
you need to study your heroes a bit more closely, but of course they make their pronouncements on TV, not in writing where the lack of logic or reason can be covered up by their pomposity and thuggishness.



On Mar 07 09:39 AM milkchaser wrote:

> I prefer the "twisted logic of capitalism" to your faulty statistics
> (the source of which you do not cite). The levels of wage growth
> are way off. I computed them using the "national average wage indexing
> series, 1951-2007" which comes from the Social Security administration
> (which is required by law to compute an accurate accounting of wages).
>
> www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/...
>
> Average American wage:
> 1959: $3,855.80
> 1973 $7,580.16
> 1999 $30,469.84
>
> To compute average annual wage growth from 1973 to 1999 (a span of
> 26 years), we must answer the question "what number to the 26th power
> turns 1973 wages into 1999 wages?"
>
> x^26 * 7580.16 = 30469.84
> x^26 = 30469.84/7580.16
> x = (30469.84/7580.16)^(1/...
> x = 1.0549
>
> This is an annual wage growth rate of 5.49%, not 1.7%. Do the same
> calculation from 1959 to 1973 and you will find an annual wage growth
> rate of 4.94%, not 2.9%. Notice this is a slightly lower rate of
> growth than the later period -- the opposite of what you claimed.
>
>
> Somebody fooled you with bad statistics -- a typical leftie trick.
> Leftists have no compunction about lying, little aptitude for math
> and a hefty incentive to make things up, because the truth does not
> support their ridiculous economics. Socialism has always been the
> best way to keep the masses poor and stupid.
>
> I did not check your statistics about profit growth, but let us assume
> they are accurate for the sake of argument. I suspect that it is
> true that profits increased at a greater annual rate during the later
> period owing to various productivity boosters (computers, cheaper
> computers, faster computers, better medicine and chemistry, better
> agriculture = cheaper food, cheaper goods = more disposable income,
> internet, LANs, etc). In 1959, the boss had his secretary type a
> letter and snail mail it to his client, whose secretary opened the
> letter and presented it to him). In 2009, the boss sends and receives
> her own email -- enchanced productivity (capitalism even empowered
> women in the process).
>
> No wonder that companies are more profitable. And why shouldn't
> the bulk of the profit go to those who risked their capital rather
> than the workers? Without the initial capital, the workers would
> have no job. When companies fail, does the capitalist ask the workers
> to refund their wages? No, he or she loses the entire investment,
> the workers keep what they earned.

The Rally, When It Comes, Will Be a Doozy

does anybody know why Autozone (AZO) is one stock that has been rising right through all of the past four months of bloodshed? i have never owned this stock but anybody that does must be smiling big time.

as for all of the yeas and nays about money-on-the-sideline, good luck with whatever you've "predicted". i'm 95% in cash with one short ETF (the Euro) and i'm not at all sure of that one.

Update on the Big Mac Index

it's all about perspective. i'll have a Hamburger Royale, thank you ......

The Bubble of Uncertainty Is About to Burst

some people around here evidently have very short memories or, conveniently selective memories. the financial chaos we're struggling with didn't suddenly spring up like a bouncing betty on January 20th or even November 5th. George Bush and his boys (Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson) created and encouraged the momentum that took us off the cliff. After a couple of flips and bounces W handed the keys to the car to Obama. how much more we get bounced and continue to fall is a true unknown.
i'm not that big an Obama fan and history may not be kind but i don't know who would've gotten more done in less than two months. i know that i don't even want to contemplate what John McCain and Sarah Palin might have done.
My biggest criticism of Obama is his decision to put Summers and Geithner in their positions. It will be interesting to see how long they last.

Will the Euro Survive?

As an American living in Germany, not far from both the Polish and Czech borders, I can't say that I have any answers about the Euro or EU member countries but my opinion is that the Euro will survive. With what modifications nobody knows at this point but, the Euro is one of the three most important currencies in the world and it's likely to continue to be so.

Forex View: Last Man Standing

in my crystal ball i see ........

back to the barter system! we're all gonna DIE!!!!!!!!

Rick Santelli: The Best Five Minutes in CNBC History

i hope you realize that the biggest consolidation of executive power ever to happen in this country took place between 2001 and 2008. it remains to be seen whether or not the Obama Administration will make serious efforts to return to honoring and protecting the Constitution. probably not unless the American people wake up and demand it.
and while i'm at it, socialism is no greater danger to democracy than fascism to which we have come dangerously close.

p.s. good luck with being poor. "they" probably won't put you in chains unless you get branded as a terrorist and thrown into a secret prison somewhere unbeknownst to your friends or family (thanks to Dick Cheney and his minions).


On Feb 20 10:59 AM jksisco wrote:

> Truth, Liberty and the American way are being threatened like never
> before. Those drinking the government's kool-aid are going to wake
> up one day and wonder what happened to their personal freedoms. We
> are systematically being fed the candy of Socialism under the cover
> of "crisis". Rick is absolutely right, and we will reap what we sow
> if we don't stop it now, a "tea party" is a great idea. I would rather
> live in Poverty, than live a life in Chains. This is not about who's
> right, it's about what's right. Those who think we can't pull through
> this with "limited" Government intervention will end up slaves on
> the plantation, let me know how that works out for you.

Rick Santelli: The Best Five Minutes in CNBC History

additional "Great Socialist Countries"

Denmark
Sweden
Norway
Finland

in each of these countries the general populace lives comfortably. there is good infrastructure, medical and health care and an excellent education system. Finland, for one, is widely recognized as having the best education system in the world.
i, for one, am a liberal and proud of it. in the minds of idiots like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin i'm a communist. i'm 72 years old and i'm still working.
it's the crudest sort of rightwing propaganda to equate laziness with liberalism as has been done on this comment stream. what is wrong with people who think like this? answer: brainwashed by the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Larry Kudlow.

Japan, Turkey, Poland, Mexico the Rising World Powers?

george friedman: bollocks. and a load of steaming excrement, i might add. at the moment i am living in Germany. any country you might name has it's problems as does Deutschland but since that maniac idiot shot himself in 1945 the country has managed pretty well. in case friedman didn't notice, the economic problems of reunification are still in the process of being ironed out. eventually this will happen and Germany will continue to be a major power.
Russia is anybody's guess. i was there from 1990 through the first half of '97. during that time it became the kind of mess that China has so far avoided.
people keep predicting that China will fall apart or at least fall back substantially from the apparent progress it made over the past twenty years. although this is certainly possible i am inclined to believe that it is just as likely a fevered neocon's fantasy. it would be an enormous irony if China manages to maintain it's economic balance while the rest of the world endures a long recession cum depression.
but since we're throwing the names of smaller countries around in speculation of who will be the future movers and shakers, i'll add Hungary, Finland and Korea.

Peak Oil's Bell Is Ringing

saying "let the market take care of it" really means "let the cleverest schemers make the most money off the situation and the devil take the hindmost". this is exactly what happened in our present worldwide financial debacle. some problems are simply not to be solved by unfettered capitalism.
long_on_oil said it best:

"wouldn't we be better off to prepare for peak oil and be proven wrong than not to prepare and face the Armageddon to come(?)."

there are more worthwhile reasons to develop alternatives to oil besides avoidance of Armageddon. the serious development of wind and solar power and the modernization of the electricity infrastructure in the US would make for a stronger economy as well as a healthier environment. a healthier environment would reduce health care costs. converting autos in America to natural gas would also improve the environment. building out the required infrastructure would be economically beneficial.

we used to be a "can do" country. we are known, historically, as innovators. what happened? why can't we do this?