There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.  – Henry David Thoreau

Corporate profits bounced back impressively since 2009, but between June 2009 and June 2011, real household median income fell 6.7 percent.

When you read things like this, is it really so surprising that people are marching in the streets?  The economy is recovering slowly, but with weak job growth and hard credit it’s only helping those that were already doing ok.

What I’m really afraid of is that this is still too positive for the opposition and we’re due for another debt-ceiling-like event to shake confidence. ]]> http://matt.ulman.net/2011/10/14/economy-ows-and-recovery/feed 0 http://matt.ulman.net/2011/06/20/countdown-to-default http://matt.ulman.net/2011/06/20/countdown-to-default#comments Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:15:46 +0000 matt drin 0 0 http://matt.ulman.net/?p=846 Dear CNBC:

I’m writing to let you know I’m quitting you.  For 10 years watching every morning I’ve let you get away with a lot of stuff, but this is too much.   This was two hour long commercial for a political agenda.  Letting someone say that we’re frozen by  ‘regulatory activism’ when we’re coming out of a crisis of regulatory failure, talking about our ‘debt crisis’ when our financing costs are at historical lows, calling debate about a joke of a budget demagoguery , I could go on and on.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch instead but there’s got to be something better.

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

The true problem is the return of neo-liberal thought and policy that is dominating debate, and the financial and political elites that are using this return to push their own destructive agendas.

And the best part is that she continues to be wrong in the comments of this story.  Very, very wrong.  Treating savings like it only counts if you have a passbook, not as an economic concept that can be positive or negative… that’s what the average person on the street would do, but it’s no way to lead a technical debate.

My immediate take on this contrast was, Bush is really gone.

It’s not supposed to be about politics in a crisis like this, but getting us out of this means that we frame the debate a certain way, and that is politics. His turning attention to people doing the right thing, and asking that we do the right thing, rather than distracting us with some sort of feel good circus (not to take anything away from Sullenberger et al) makes me think we might have a chance.