From Paul Krugman:

“The op-ed contains the usual — false claims that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis, false claims that fear of government policy — as opposed to weak demand — is holding back investment and hiring. But I was struck by this passage:

The predilection to blame business was manifest in one of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches. He was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. Instead he lashed out at “unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restriction on activities that might harm the environment, take advantage of middle-class families, or, as we’ve seen, threaten to bring down the entire financial system.”

This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonisation – widely seen in the business community as a resort to economic populism on the part of Mr Obama to shore up the growing weakness in his political standing – is exactly the wrong approach.

“That sounded odd, since Obama is not, in fact, given to random business-bashing. So what’s the context? Here’s what Obama actually said:

Too much regulation or too much spending can stifle innovation, can hamper confidence and growth, and hurt business and families. A government that does too little can be just as irresponsible as a government that does too much — because, for example, in the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system. That’s bad for everybody.

“Kind of different, isn’t it? That’s only business-bashing if you believe that there’s no such thing as businesses who cut costs by ignoring the environmental impact of their activities, or take risks that end up endangering the financial system. If so, I wish I lived on your planet.

“I think this is telling. This is the only actual example of Obama’s alleged demonization of business that Zuckerman offers — and it’s essentially a mini-Breitbart, a quote taken out of context to make it seem as if Obama was saying something he wasn’t. That’s typical of the whole argument.

“Oh, and one more thing: are there no copy editors at the FT? When I quote someone in my column, I supply the source material, and my copy editor checks, not just to be sure that the quote is accurate, but that it’s not taken out of context. But I guess such rules don’t apply if you’re a conservative.”

This is getting ridiculous. So here’s the story:

1. Brietbart, the same guy who helped fake the ACORN controversy, makes up a fake race-bait controversy against some nobody in Obama’s Agriculture dept.

2. When the Secretary of Agricutlure Tom Vilsack finds out that she is going to talked abut on Glenn Beck’s show, he has a message sent asking her to resign.

3. FoxNews.Com runs story entitled “Caught on Tape: Obama Offical Discriminates Against White Farmer” claiming that “Days after the NAACP clashed with Tea Party members over allegations of racism, a video has surfaced showing an Agriculture Department official regaling an NAACP audience with a story about how she withheld help to a white farmer facing bankruptcy.”

4. At the same time O’Reilly calls for her dismissal on-air, an onscreen notice reveals that she has resigned.

5. The rest of video surfaces, proving she didn’t discriminate against the farmer’s wife. The farmer and his wife go on CNN to say they weren’t discriminated against.

6. Fox blames Obama for jumping to conclusions and claims that Sherrod “was forced to resign before anybody on Fox said a word about this.”

7. Breitbart goes on CNN and suggests the farmer and his wife are fakes.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zTx37smdZo[/youtube]

From Michael Snyder on Yahoo:

“The 22 statistics detailed here prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence in America.

“The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.

“So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and “free trade” that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn’t tell us that the “global economy” would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.”

Here are the statistics to prove it:

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

“CNN’s Kyra Phillips and John Roberts spent a good five minutes yesterday expressing serious concern over what they called “the dark side” of the Internet: the plague of “anonymous bloggers” who are “a bunch of cowards” for not putting their names on what they say, and who use this anonymity to spread “conspiracy,” “lunacy,” “extremism” and false accusations (video below). The segment included excerpts from an interview with Andrew Keene, author of Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, who explained that the Real Media must serve as “gatekeepers” to safeguard the public against the dangers of anonymity on the Internet. Roberts demanded that bloggers should “have the courage at the very least to put your name on it,” while Phillips announced: “something is going to have to be done legally. . . . these people have to be held accountable, they’re a bunch of cowards.”

“These CNN journalists have a very good point, of course: it was, after all, Internet bloggers — using the scourge of anonymity — who convinced the nation of a slew of harmful conspiracy theories: Saddam had WMD, an alliance with Al Qaeda, and responsibility for the anthrax mailings. Anonymity is also what allowed bloggers to smear Richard Jewell, Wen Ho Lee, and Steven Hatfill with totally false accusations that destroyed their lives and reputation, and it’s what enabled bloggers to lie to the nation about Jessica Lynch’s heroic firefight, countless U.S. airstrikes, and a whole litany of ongoing lies about our current wars. And remember when anonymous bloggers spewed all sorts of nasty, unaccountable bile about Sonia Sotomayor’s intellect and temperament? Just as Roberts lamented, blogs — as a result of anonymity — are the “Wild West of the Internet . . . . like a giant world-wide bathroom wall where you can write anything about anyone.””

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/24/anonymity/index.html

“Following this surreal episode involving a heretofore obscure black female USDA official – an episode in which almost everyone involved acted like a complete and utter buffoon, from Tom Vilsack to Ben Jealous to Bill O’Reilly – there’s really only one thing we can say with absolute certainty. And that’s this: there are a hell of a lot of people in this country who enjoy talking about racism way, way too much.

“This applies to people on both sides of our burgeoning race war, an increasingly unavoidable drag of a phenomenon that is looking now like a very good bet to drench the next 5-10 years of domestic political discourse in cacophonous suckhood. On the Tea Party side, I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.

“It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.

“They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008 – the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans – “When was the last time you saw two Indians?””

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/184697/83512

“”The intent was clear. Provide a race-based scandal as a counter-example to deflect the news media away from teabagger racism and Mark Williams, and provide fuel to racist right-wing fears that the Obama administration is keeping the white man down.

“The story moved from Breitbart to Fox News at lightning speed, and by the end of Monday, Sherrod had been forced to resign – according to her, by the USDA on orders from the White House.

“If you know anything about Andrew Breitbart and video, you know what’s coming next. The rest of the fucking video. By all accounts, the video, which should be either out or imminently out, reveals a giant pile of inconvenient facts edited out by Breitbart, or, if you believe Breitbart, whoever gave him the video. But who would be stupid enough to believe Breitbart? We’ll answer that question in a second. First, the inconvenient facts.

“One, the incident Sherrod recounted happened 24 years ago. Two, it happened before she was a government employee. Three, she was telling this story because this was her initial reaction, she realized it was wrong, changed her ways, and went on to help the family keep their farm. The family she supposedly discriminated against called into CNN to say Sherrod didn’t discriminate against them, and they would fucking well know, wouldn’t they?

“But Tom Vilsack was stupid enough to believe Andrew Breitbart, even though Breitbart’s entire track record consists of deceptively edited video, punctuated with the occasional run out to a balcony to accidentally support child slavery. Nobody should ever believe Breitbart – not because he’s an insane, drunken wingnut, but because he has a demonstrable record of being completely fucking wrong about every single thing he touches. EVERY SINGLE THING.”

http://www.youaredumb.net/node/1584