Not one comment/post on the State of the Union Address?

[denjohn]

All this work depends on the courage and sacrifice of those who serve in dangerous places at great personal risk – our diplomats, our intelligence officers, and the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. As long as I’m Commander-in-Chief, we will do whatever we must to protect those who serve their country abroad, and we will maintain the best military in the world. We will invest in new capabilities, even as we reduce waste and wartime spending. We will ensure equal treatment for all service members, and equal benefits for their families – gay and straight. We will draw upon the courage and skills of our sisters and daughters, because women have proven under fire that they are ready for combat. We will keep faith with our veterans – investing in world-class care, including mental health care, for our wounded warriors; supporting our military families; and giving our veterans the benefits, education, and job opportunities they have earned. And I want to thank my wife Michelle and Dr. Jill Biden for their continued dedication to serving our military families as well as they serve us.

Jeez.....Of coarse he said some cheery things.
Watch what they do (or don't), not what they say, don't let the stage drama fool you.

Very lovely words and they certainly distract from a meaningful discussion, let alone action, about reducing the size of our unsustainable, incredibly resource draining, big bank/big corporation serving war machine, global empire and military presence.

All's well folks, move right along, nothing to see here...............the status quo is just fine.

Colin.....it seems to me that you are somewhat blinded by a probably well intentioned desire to defend the good left in order to protect us from the evil right (I've been there).
They are both big government Tools of the Financial/Corporate elite who benefit from the divisive and distracting left/right bickering.
Consider that a better battle-line may be big v small.

[Amskeptic]

Jeez.....Of coarse he said some cheery things.

Colin.....it seems to me that you are somewhat blinded by a probably well intentioned desire to defend the good left in order to protect us from the evil right (I've been there).

My waters run deeper than simple tribal loyalty.

I see far fewer people "blinded" by hope and possibility as those blinded by despair and cyncism. Some of us will call out those words as inspiration in a sea of cynicism. There are still people who hope and they are responsive to words that are not so much "cheery" as calls to both dream and act. Do not forget, denjohn, that the President was speaking to the children of America as well as adults in that moment.

Although my season of offering hope and inspiration is pretty much past, I will not forget how important it was at the time, not when those kids of yesteryear tell me today the effect of my words long since forgotten. This is true of parents who may be aghast at long-ago forgotten hurtful words that their children-come-adults remember all too well.
Colin
(please note that there are sprinklings throughout Free Speech where I have championed the older definition of Republican values, this current crop of yahoos are an embarrassment to the country. For example, I believe! in capitalism, not subsidies to energy and agriculture. I believe in frugality and live it and am not in debt in any way and do not take services in any way, yet Mitch McConnell gives a half billion dollar waiver to a Big Pharma contributor in the last fiscal cliff bill while stomping on the "moochers" that do not get a living wage???? I am a sane enough Republican to understand that if I want my service business to grow, I need people who can afford them! I want the U.S. to BE exceptional through excellence! not chest-thumping by idiot losers like Ted Cruz spewing nonsense at confirmation hearings)

[denjohn]

Why it is 'watch what they do, not what they say':

"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.

The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy..........

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

More at http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.co ... ldman.html

[Amskeptic]

Why it is 'watch what they do, not what they say':

"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

Ouch. What is your personal plan to address this while you are on Earth?
Colin

[denjohn]

Ouch. What is your personal plan to address this while you are on Earth?
Colin

Probably like most, I feel relatively powerless V the powers that be, there's not really a plan, more a direction, somewhat persistent and vigilant re Small V Big.

I'm trying to see things as clearly as possible, scrutinize sources, don't own a TV.
I believe that an informed populace is key to a, hopefully peaceful, movement to effect change at the top, but that seems a long way off in our complacent society.
When I believe that sharing my view, or the view of those I respect, may be of benefit to others, I do, with a compassionate intention. Same as you, Colin.
There is much we agree on, tho I seem to see corporate controlled Big Gov as a much bigger problem, less of a solution, than you.

Perhaps I see our situation not so much as a problem that has a solution but more as a predicament that is unraveling. The more clearly we see things, the more wisely we can shape the outcome.
I believe that personal and community resilience are very important (Small), and am acting on that belief as part of a 'personal plan'. I was gladdened by some of the member sentiment expressed in the recent, albeit short so far, Changes Ahead thread.
I believe this will end poorly for many too dependent on Big.
Big Gov, as we know it, is unsustainable.

Because of my belief in, and desire to protect myself from, the lack of wisdom and/or integrity of TPTB, I keep most of my savings in gold and silver instead of fiat currency.

If Ron Paul had a chance, I probably would have voted for him, think that much of what he professed would have been a healthy direction for this country.

Some of these thoughts perhaps cast me in a 'right wing' light..........for the record, I was a vocal Bush opponent during his reign and enthusiastically voted for Hope and Change in 2008. How wonderful to be part of a country whose leader has won the Nobel Peace Prize. I've had a bit of an epiphany since those naive days. I'm not bashing the Dems and Obama, I have even less respect for the politics of the right, I'm trying to point out the failure and harm of corporate controlled Big Gov.

I really do my best to Do good, avoid harm, and purify the mind. Reckon that's as good as a 'personal plan' gets.

Some words by a fellow that goes by the handle of Rhare over at Chris Martenson's site:

First step is to quit praying to the government god to save you and see the system for what is is. People looking to slough off responsibility and other people willing to take advantage of them to further their own well being. Once you understand that, the solutions become apparent - reclaiming responsibility for oneself.

It is far too easy to look at the solution to problems as more regulation, more government, or just the right people in government. That seems to always be the path of least resistance - someone else can solve the problem, rather than perhaps we need to reduce the role of government in our everyday lives. Only then do "people" get power, only then can you and I effect change through example and voluntary choices.

If I wasn't an optimist I wouldn't post. I still believe it's possible to change our path, but it takes discussing these issues and challenging beliefs that have been indoctrinated into us all via media and the education system. We have been taught for quite some time now that government is the solution to all problems.

Warm wishes
Denny

[Amskeptic]

I seem to see corporate controlled Big Gov as a much bigger problem, less of a solution, than you.

Big Gov, as we know it, is unsustainable.

I'm not bashing the Dems and Obama, I have even less respect for the politics of the right,
I'm trying to point out the failure and harm of corporate controlled Big Gov.

Rhare over at Chris Martenson's site:
"First step is to quit praying to the government god to save you and see the system for what is is. People looking to slough off responsibility"

It is far too easy to look at the solution to problems as more regulation, more government, or just the right people in government. That seems to always be the path of least resistance -
We have been taught for quite some time now that government is the solution to all problems.

I get this feeling . . . that you don't like big government or something.
I do need to clarify and re-iterate that I am not a "big" government sort of guy. That is why I look at the total expenditures of government in relation to the GDP for example, or size as an employer. Factually speaking, it has not grown any larger than it was in 1962, it is around 22-24% of GDP. So when did Big Gov actually grow too big?

You know, you KNOW that I am spitting nails about corporate pimping of Congress. That is not some philosophical place for me. There are individuals (Tom Delay, Ralph Reed, Jack Abramoff, now Mitch McConnell) who abuse our Representative Democracy. I love our Representative Democracy. That does not make me a willing punching bag to libertarians who have not given me an eloquent or impassioned discourse on what the hell is so bad about our Representative Democracy! Lobbying is a huge corrosive problem! That is what I hate! I hate any Koch/Adelson type of rich person who thinks he is God's gift to Congress and oils the legislative wheels for his own benefit . . . that is NOT Representative Democracy!

I respect what our Representative Democracy is capable of doing for all of us American citizens, but I fear the crazy right-wingers who have spewed so much poison about government that they mislead people into hating our Representative Democracy instead of the individuals who are getting rich off of it at our expense!

Do I give you this notion that I am all about more regulation? I like regulation of traffic lights and mandatory insurance coverage and I like electrical standards and water standards and safety standards, what the hell regulation am I supposed to chafe against? Example?

I love our Representative Democracy. I love our traditions like the State of the Union and our elections and anytime we come together as a country to direct its future. I cannot stand at all the big mouths who are poisoning the discourse because they can't see the big picture.

Is Big Gov "unsustainable" because of the social net programs? Is that what you are talking about?
Social Security - get rid of the cap, problem solved.
Medicare - allow competition by God capitalist competition for pharmaceuticals why the hell get mad at your government when it is rich lobbyists who have cooked the books and gamed the system???
Healthcare - we spend so damn much on overhead to HMO management, and have so many ninny replications in the system, that we could actually afford to cover every citizen for less than what we pay now if we were single-payer without this evil profit motive rationalizing $1,500.00 per/pill for troubled pregnancies and other boondoggles.
The Federal Reserve - needs to be brought back to real Earth. Would you allow your Big Government to do the job?
The Military - you think we could take it back from these huge bloated "defense" contractors and have a lean technological quick flexible self-defense? Are you going to blame our mis-Represented Democracy for that? Or chickenshit spineless congressmembers who can only think to bring home the bacon to their districts?
I swear campaign finance reform could break this Congressional Misrepresentation money game as surely as legalizing drugs could break the cartels.
But who has the courage? Who wants to save our Representative Democracy when they are pouring poison all over it?

It is US as a nation, through the instrument of our voting decisions that made America great in the world community. We as a Nation through our government, executed the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the Apollo moon shot, the interstate highway system, and my favorate by far, our serious support of public education. What has happened? Is it that government has always been the bad guy? NO. It is that the corporate fatcats have infected our government and blighted our future in the name of short-term advantage.
Colin
(who has never asked the government or any agency of the government to take care of one damn thing in my life ever, never. Nor am I a penny in debt to anyone . . . living the libertarian creed)

[denjohn]

Colin......I'm glad to see that you also don't think well of the corporate controlled aspect of our big government.

There is much we agree on

I get this feeling . . . that you don't like big government or something.

For sure, I don't like corporate controlled big government and that's what we've got. That difference may have been overlooked in your post. It's the corporate controlled part that I find especially repugnant.
I'm seriously not sure if your post was directed to me for response or if it was mostly a general clarification of your perspective with rhetorical questions.
There was a lot there, if there were things that wanted further discussion, let's take them one at a time.

[denjohn]

I do need to clarify and re-iterate that I am not a "big" government sort of guy. That is why I look at the total expenditures of government in relation to the GDP for example, or size as an employer. Factually speaking, it has not grown any larger than it was in 1962, it is around 22-24% of GDP.

mmmmm.......I'm good w the first sentence, but the last one raised an eyebrow.........not sure where you get that but the numbers I'm seeing at
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spe ... l_Spending
indicate that it has gone up to an estimated 24.33% in 2012 (2011 actual 24.09%) from 18.24% in 1962. An increase of 33%.

And perhaps a better metric is debt/gdp which has doubled 51.72% to 104.80% in that time,
http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/spending ... deral_Debt.

And all that is based on the rebuttable presumption that the GDP calculation has not been massaged thru the years.
GDP is in fact a very fuzzy denominator for those calcs.
The following is a bit dated, but doubt things have gotten any more reality based in the meantime.
Chris Martenson:

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is how we tell ourselves that our economy is either doing well or doing poorly. In theory, the GDP is the sum total of all value-added transactions within our country in any given year.

Here’s an example, though, of how far from reality GDP has strayed. The reported number for 2003 was a GDP of $11 trillion, implying that $11 trillion of money-based, value-added economic transactions had occurred.

However, nothing of the sort happened.

First, that 11 trillion included $1.6 trillion of imputations, where it was assumed that economic value had been created but no actual transactions took place.

The largest of these imputations was the “value” that the owner of a house receives by not having to pay themselves rent. Get that? If you own your house free and clear, the government adds how much they think you should be paying yourself rent to live there and adds that amount to the GDP.

Another is the benefit you receive from the “free checking” provided by your bank, which is imputed to have a value, because if it weren’t free, then you’d have to pay for it. So that value is guesstimated and added to the GDP as well. Together, just these two imputations add up to over a trillion dollars of our reported GDP.

Next, the GDP has many elements that are hedonically adjusted. For instance, computers are hedonically adjusted to account for the idea that, because they are faster and more feature-rich than in past years, they must be more additive to our economic output.

So if a thousand dollar computer were sold, it would be recorded as contributing more than a thousand dollars to the GDP. Of course, that extra money is fictitious, in the sense that it never traded hands and doesn’t exist.

What’s interesting is that for the purposes of inflation measurements, hedonic adjustments are used to reduce the apparent price of computers, but for GDP calculations, hedonic adjustments are used to boost their apparent price. Hedonics, therefore, are used to maneuver prices higher or lower, depending on which outcome makes thing look more favorable.

So what were the total hedonic adjustments in 2003? An additional, whopping $2.3 trillion. Taken together, these mean that $3.9 trillion, or fully 35% of our reported GDP, was NOT BASED on transactions that you could witness, record, or touch. They were guessed at, modeled, or imputed, but they did not show up in any bank accounts, because no cash ever changed hands.

As an aside, when you hear people say things like “our debt to GDP is still quite low” or “income taxes as a percentage of GDP are historically low,” it’s important to remember that because GDP is artificially high, any ratio where GDP is the denominator will be artificially low.

[Amskeptic]

perhaps a better metric is debt/gdp which has doubled 51.72% to 104.80% in that time,
35% of our reported GDP, was NOT BASED on transactions that you could witness, record, or touch.

Glad you brought that up.

This entire money game has become witless witnessless, recordless, touchless, electronic numbers.
It does not strike fear in me. I live in a material world and do material things to survive in it.

If the fiat currency collapses, I will feed myself via barter after helping people fix their whatever needs fixing.

The gazillionbillionaire trapped in his mansion who couldn't feed a goldfish and whose money is utterly worthless, will come to me to perhaps figure out a way to make a hot cup of coffee using a bicycle and the alternator out of his Bentley, I don't know. It is all a game.

That people will *suffer* when the game collapses seems probable. I will only do my part to ameliorate that suffering with whatever resources I may bring to bear. The scared little hedge fund manager scuttling between useless cars? He can gather twigs for our supper fire.

We have the capacity to dispense with this horrible game in an instant when it fails of its own perversity. Nobody but nobody has to starve or not have shelter. Power shifts may be exhilarating as the Wall Street types find themselves supplicating to the redneck who knows how to make a meal out of a rabbit.
Colin

[denjohn]

If the fiat currency collapses, I will feed myself via barter after helping people fix their whatever needs fixing.

Ja .....small v big.

Nobody but nobody has to starve or not have shelter.
Colin

Hope I'm wrong on this, but I reckon there will be huge disruptions to our 'just in time' food supply chain as things unravel.
And there is the huge fossil fuel component to modern agriculture; fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, insecticides.

[Amskeptic]

If the fiat currency collapses, I will feed myself via barter after helping people fix their whatever needs fixing.

Ja .....small v big.

Nobody but nobody has to starve or not have shelter.
Colin

Hope I'm wrong on this, but I reckon there will be huge disruptions to our 'just in time' food supply chain as things unravel.
And there is the huge fossil fuel component to modern agriculture; fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, insecticides.

Believe it or not, I do believe that even if the whole ball of wax goes down, we WILL keep the modern engine going a while longer based on cooperative understanding. Meaning, after all the hatred that comes with the unfair system we have now, the Holy Crap We Have To Survive This! system will demand that we all just do our jobs because they need to be done. What drives every single working person in the country right now, bar none? We HAVE to make money. We have to hold in our hands, a terrible unfairness. What if the money system has collapsed into its own unfairness and greed? The richest "suffer" the most, the poorest have less to lose . . . like nothing actually, they may even be released into a deserved freedom! freedom from debt to the fiat system ("It")! So the petro guys who need to eat will keep pushing it out, the transportation people will transport, because we all need to eat, and the poor guy making pizza will be so relieved he is no longer in debt . . . perhaps we will discover that real living comes the instant It all goes to hell.
Colin

[denjohn]

Again, hope I'm wrong.
At the time of the bailout one of the big concerns was that credit markets would freeze up.........if the owners of things are not assured of payment for shipments of their goods, they are unlikely to to ship them.
This is a bit distant from "What drives every single working person in the country right now."
It's going to take some time to implement workarounds to business as usual.
Many seemingly knowledgeable folks who saw the bailouts as truly morally repugnant also saw them as a necessary evil.....their biggest criticisms being the way they were handled and that almost nothing has been done to prevent the recurrence.

[denjohn]

Backing up to debt, here's an interesting vid with some 'behind the headline numbers' discussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... FdYT8OI6b0

Troll, I'd apologize for drifting so far from your original post, but I think you intended to stir things up, well done.

[TrollFromDownBelow]

Troll, I'd apologize for drifting so far from your original post, but I think you intended to stir things up, well done.

Absolutely no apologies necessary! Intent wasn't to 'stir things up' per se ... that sometimes has negative connotations... I'd like to think of it as a little poke to get people roused from apathetic thinking and get some good, creative, juicy, constructive commentary going....think some folks took the 'bait' ...oops, did I just stir things up?

Cheers,
Mike

[Amskeptic]

a little poke to get people roused from apathetic thinking
...oops, did I just stir things up?

Dijoo . . . dijoo jes cawl me a "liddle poke"?