So maybe now it's a recovery for the rest of us:
The U.S. economy roared into overdrive in the third quarter as consumer and business spending fueled the biggest expansion in more than a decade.It's been a recovery for the wheeler-dealers for a long time now. Here's the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past five years:
Gross domestic product grew at a 5 percent annual rate from July through September, the biggest advance since the third quarter of 2003 and up from a previously estimated 3.9 percent, revised figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg projected a 4.3 percent increase in GDP....
And yet the wheeler-dealers have spent the Obama years sulking:
As a CNBC contributor, I heard a lot of commentators whining that Obama was too mean to businesmen. @JoyAnnReid pic.twitter.com/JkihUdQQV7
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) December 23, 2014Well, you can lump them in with the cop unions and intelligence professionals, who've decided lately that they get an inadequate amount of respect, a word that, to them, means "unquestioning deference."
Charlie Pierce is right to say that revolt within the intelligence and cop communities is a threat to our political system:
For the past two weeks, on two different fronts, we have been confronted with the unpleasant fact that there are people working in the institutions of our self-government who believe themselves not only beyond the control and sanctions of the civil power, but also beyond the control and sanctions of their direct superiors.... In Washington, John Brennan, the head of the CIA, came right up to the edge of insubordination against the president who hired him in the wake of the Senate report on American torture. Meanwhile, in New York, in the aftermath of weeks of protests against the strangulation of Eric Garner by members of the New York Police Department, two patrolmen, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, were murdered in their squad car by a career criminal and apparent maniac named Ismaaiyl Brinsley. In response, ... the NYPD is acting in open rebellion against Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York, and the civil power he represents over them. This is an incredibly perilous time for democracy at the most basic levels....It's dangerous that we're losing sight of the basic notion that these people work for us, not the other way around. But we're also surrendering to the notion that we get by in America (or fail to) at the whim of Wall Street and corporate chieftains -- the misnamed "job creators" -- rather than the other way around. The rich don't like regulation, don't like taxation, and don't want us questioning those preferences. Generally, we don't.
It is very simple. If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us. If the NYPD runs a slow-motion coup against the freely elected mayor of New York, then it is running a slow-motion coup against all the people of New York. There is no exemption from this fundamental truth about the way this country and its system is supposed to work.
In each case, we fearfully defer to the powerful because we think the powerful have the power of life and death over us. And the powerful take it as their due.
In spite of the Retard's best effort at obstruction.
ReplyDeleteAs long as they're not egregious and completely over-the-top in their efforts to make money, or protect us, we generally look the other way at Wall Street's greed, and our police and national security's excesses.
ReplyDeleteBut, now they want their even egregious excesses treated with R-E-S-P-E-C-T!
STFU, Wall Street - you're already killed off the middle class in your endless greed.
And STFU, police and national security - we're lost enough of our precious rights.
I try to explain to my young niece and nephew what this country used to be like, and they look at me as if I had two heads (I barely have one).
They grew-up in a completely different American than I and people of my age, did.
Back then, even the very rich and powerful felt some sort of constraints.
Not anymore!
After Nixon and Reagan unleashed the greed - and Bush I and Clinton helped, and then Bush II took off almost all constraints - greed and security are out of control.
Most of "We the people," have little or nothing to protect anymore, thanks to the greed of the rich, and the measures taken to 'secure' us.
Most of those security measures will be turned on "We the people," if we decide we've had enough of getting financially raped by a rigged system.