Posted by AzBlueMeanie: The corporate media had a love affair with the Koch brothers' corporate-funded Astroturf Tea Party front groups (Americans For Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express) in 2009-2010. They couldn't get enough of angry old white people calling an African-American president all kinds of racist names and questioning his birth, disrupting town hall meetings … Read more

by David Safier Translation of the headline: It's OK If You're Babeau's Department Spokesperson. Lt. Tamatha Villar was caught going over 90 MPH three times. The last time, the officer who stopped her estimated she was traveling 100 MPH, with her 10 year old son in the front passenger seat. What happened to her? Nothing. … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: Lying here in the darknessI hear the sirens wailSomebody's going to emergencySomebody's going to jail– New York Minute, by Don Henley All I can say is it is about damn time! What I don't understand is why they filed this lawsuit on one of the worst news dump Fridays before a long … Read more

by David Safier This is more Dan Gibson's territory over at The Range than mine. I'm too old to find this kind of thing myself, but one of my favorite ex-students, Kat Nyberg, isn't. She put it on Facebook, and if Kat says watch, I watch. If you enjoy this stop animation video by "OK … Read more

by David Safier This week was the kickoff of what I hope will be an ongoing series, ALEC and the Arizona Legislature. Lisa Hoffman has been busy compiling Arizona legislation and resolutions which began as ALEC models and adding background information. I've been searching out more information and working the material into what I hope … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Corporations are sitting on record profits, much of it held overseas from developing markets. Corporations are not creating jobs in America where corporations have been dismantling America's industrial base and outsourcing manufacturing capacity and jobs to those same developing markets for decades.

Corporations discovered during the Bush Great Recession that they could slash their American workforce and increase productivity from their remaining workforce to maintain and/or increase profitability. This is The new corporate business model: increase profits, not jobs that I have been posting about for more than a year now. Corporations have no financial incentive to hire new employees under this new corporate business model — those jobs are not coming back as long as this remains the business model.

Despite all the Tea-Publican rhetoric about how we need to reduce regulations on business and give more tax cuts to the "job creators" to create jobs, we now have a full decade of history behind these faith based supply-side "trickle down" GOP economic policies to demonstrate that these policies have been a complete and utter failure, they have been entirely disproved and discredited.

Deregualtion of the financial services sector led to the creation of casino capitalism on Wall Street where the banksters of Wall Street engaged in the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of the world (securitized mortgages traded in unregulated shadow markets as bundled derivatives and the bets hedged against with credit default swaps), 'Robo-signing' dates to '98; home-sale problems mount – banks are still using these prctoces today Robo-Signing Redux: Servicers Still Fabricating Foreclosure Documents – American Banker, which was directly responsible for the hyper-inflated housing bubble that burst and nearly destroyed the world's financial system and the world's economy in late 2008.

The financial system was rescued only by a massive bailout of the criminal banksters of Wall Street by monetary policy from sovereign governments and the TARP fund here at home. The economic slide into another great depression was halted only by massive stimulus spending by governments, including our own.

These charts Jared Bernstein posted this week show the positive impact of the Recovery Act.

 

Here’s another image, showing what happened to the job market.

 

The economy and employment were falling off the cliff, then the stimulus started, and things got modestly better (the stimulus package was too small, as Paul Krugman and others have argued). This isn’t even controversial; economists agree.

Yet Tea-Publicans demonized these economic rescue efforts, preferring the economic policies of Herbert Hoover's Treasury Secretary, Andrew W. Mellon, who opposed any government action to stem the tide of plunging business activity and soaring unemployment. Instead, he urged a policy of supreme indifference (laissez-faire) — now the "invisible hand" of the free market.

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he said. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” he added, and values “will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

We have now had a full decade of the massive Bush tax cuts which were sold to the American public on the promise it would lead to economic growth and job creation. These massive tax cuts accomplished neither. Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record – Real Time Economics – WSJ. What it did accomplish was the largest redistribution of wealth upwards to the über-rich and the greatest income disparity since the Gilded Age, just before the Crash of 1929. inequality.org. And it resulted in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Heckuva job!

President Obama added the largest middle-class tax cut in history on top of the massive Bush tax cuts in 2009 as part of the Recovery Act. The stimulus was the biggest middle-class tax cut in history.

Taxes on "job creators" are much lower today than they were before the Bush tax cuts took effect in 2001, yet the number of employed Americans has dropped from 132.5 million to 131.2 million over the past decade. (At the same time, the population has increased by 27 million). This is a massive structural jobs deficit that will take years of above-average economic growth to remedy. Tax cuts do not create jobs. America simply cannot afford continuing the failed GOP economic policies.

Despite this demonstrated failure of GOP economic policies the American people, in a pique of anger, turned the keys to the government back over to the very people who drove the country into the ditch in the first pace in 2010. As H.L. Mencken observed, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." We are our own worst enemy, or as Pogo observed, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

The Tea-Publicans held the country hostage for an "austerity" plan of massive budget cuts in April. The Tea-Publicans held the country hostage again for more massive budget cuts in July. They are again threatening another hostage taking, massive budget cuts and continuing intransigence on raising taxes in the bipartisan Super Committee about to get underway. The effect of the GOP "austerity" is now impacting the economy with the intended result — Tea-Publican "austerity" has killed job growth. Daily Kos: Mission accomplished: Tea party Republicans took the economy hostage and killed job growth: