I have been wanting to know, for some time now, how the regulars of this group feel

[mother earth]

things will be playing out in the months ahead. Are you encouraged by anything, are you discouraged completely...I know the global picture is bad. I've been thinking the dominoes could or might start with the decline of the Euro, starting with a Greece exit.

Then, I'm thinking, no...it can't possibly get to that point, collapse is not something that could happen.
There really are many things that can be done to stimulate the economy.

I guess I'm left wondering how bad does it have to get before FDR measures are resurrected or at least topics of discussion among those who can put them into practice.

One thing is for sure...Rmoney in the WH could prove fatal to the economy...quickly and globally.
I'm thinking Obama will be an FDR in the making real soon...there may be little choice.

Any thoughts?

If speculation is frowned upon, please forgive me...I don't think I'm alone in wondering about this topic though.
There are just too many likenesses to the Great Depression for my liking...and too much gridlock to change things until after this election.

Maybe what is needed here are the suggestions by leading economists on what needs to be done to turn this train wreck around.

[Vincardog]

1. IMO this election is about the speed, not the direction of the economy. The collapse is inevitable

unless we radically change the basic premiss of our economy.

Unrestrained Capitalism will always ultimately result in grotesque concentrations of capital and power
until the system disintegrates.

Since NEITHER political power in this country is willing to address this issue it is a foregone conclusion.

[mother earth]

2. I've been feeling this way myself...sadly, one way slower than the other, but I'm thinking once this

downward spiral is clear & the dust settles...real focus will be needed & therein would lie a new and better way for all, one would hope.
Thank you for your response.

[johnsolaris]

3. science fiction

Hi,

People do not truly understand that the government has little real power to change the direction in the economy. Yes, there are some things they can do, but with our system it is the private sector that has to do the bulk of the work in changing direction.

Is it time to implement FDR measures ??? It could be, with many experts saying that the real unemployment rate is in the 20-25% range. As a person that has been severely underemployed for over 3 years now, I am not counted as unemployed because my job is part time & that is being polite. The not counted, people that have quit looking for work, the part timers like myself & the people that are no longer receiving unemployment money is a huge number. The number of people working vs the number of people not working in the population is a very bad sign. Look this up !!

The real scary thing about all this is that it has been predicted. Many science fiction writers have written of the corporate take over of the government & the collapse of society by crazy people trying to bring down the government. A subject that most people think could never happen & rightly so, does it look like we are in a depression? No it does not, but what is bubbling under the surface. We should be one planet & one people, since we are all human. We are not even one country & one people, The republicans would never let that happen.

[mother earth]

5. Welcome to DU, johnsolaris, I wholeheartedly agree.

[femrap]

4. I look at the pictures

of men with hats standing nicely in line waiting for their apple during The Great Depression. Is that possible today? At that time, I believe 25% of the population were farmers and could at least feed themselves.

During the winter, my grandparents (farmers w/ 5 children) all slept in one room downstairs because they couldn't afford to heat the house. My mother and her sisters wore the same outfit to school every day. My grandfather refused to talk to me about The Great Depression...it was that awful. And today....how many more people are there?

Will young people join a group like the CCC and go out and dig a lake? Build a dam? Live in tents for months? If so, I'm sure Halliburton will be the only one making money on the project.

China's growth is slowing dramatically. Europe is their biggest importer. Maybe Germany will be the one to leave the Euro, not Greece. People are looting grocery stores in Spain...just to give to the Food Banks. In Greece, children are sent to live with other families because their family could not afford them.

It will be a World Depression because we are fully enmeshed in GLOBALIZATION. At least that will end when the 'reset' button is hit.

Corporations have RUINED this country....hell, the entire world.

[mother earth]

6. Thank you for your response, femrap...corporations care not about human rights and globalization has

been an excuse to profit where there are no labor laws, nor environmental, etc. Everyone just wants to survive and provide for their families.

[Egalitarian Thug]

7. They're going to keep the illusion going at least until the election,

if they can, and that, while likely, is far from certain. One of the biggest illusions erected is that we narrowly averted disaster, we didn't. The global economy didn't nearly collapse, it collapsed. We are like people in California standing on the beach on a fine sunny day and watching the tidal wave approach from the horizon. It's so fay away and it's such a beautiful day, how can we posssibly be in imminent danger?

I don't think you wanted a treatise on recent economic history, but go back and look at the how and what the stock market was doing in the summer of 2008. We have left the principles of sound investing so far behind that few even remember what they are, The same Wall Street parasites are playing the same games and are being watched by the same "regulators" (employees).

Be careful.

[mother earth]

9. Each and every response is soooo valued, thank you for yours, ET. We forget, we want to actually.

The truth is not easy to look at.

[Egalitarian Thug]

16. You've hit that nail squarely on the head. We have become a population of children hiding under

the covers and screaming for mommy to chase the monsters from our room, except that these monsters really exist.

OTOH, none of us can do anything about it, so enjoy what you have and remember that these are the good old days we will look back on.

[mother earth]

18. I don't think we'll look back upon them as good. I think out of the ashes will come better, I hope

so - something that's better suited and geared for honoring what all of us value - a better life. Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? I believe FDR tried to prevent it from ever happening again, but greed & the oligarchy derailed those protections.

[Egalitarian Thug]

20. Hear, hear! I really hope your hopes are realized.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty old and have seen too much to be very optimistic. This is all so avoidable, but the people that are going to pay the price don't see it and the people that benefit from disaster are the people that are making it happen.

[Warpy]

8. A lot of us on this thread speculate

Collapse can and will happen since the bankers won't allow Congress to make the structural changes to this economy that would prevent it.

The collapse will be of the derivatives casino, where high rollers place bets on bets against bets to try to reduce the risk inherent in investing. It will happen very fast and no one but a handful of insiders will see it coming, and even they will be in denial about it. When it goes, it will take everything, to the point the government will likely be forced to nationalize the banks just to keep them open. As in the Great Depression, money will disappear overnight.

The fact that it is likely to happen is no guarantee that it will soon. However, it will if radical changes aren't made and Congress has always been a reactive, not a proactive, body.

So if you want to scare yourself into paralysis, think about this one. However, if you're wiser, you'll go about your business in the knowledge that people on the bottom who don't have all the facts have no way to prepare themselves for total collapse, so you might as well enjoy what you have today even if you don't get to keep it until the day you die.

[mother earth]

11. I hear you, esp. since Bernanke didn't do much about much today, thanks, Warpy.

[PDJane]

10. That depends on which leading economists one is talking about.

The Friedmanite economists, like the one who is currently in charge of the fed, are the economists who got us into this mess in the first place.

If one is speaking about people like Robert Reich, then yes, his prescriptions have been known to work, and proven to work. However, getting the PTB to take is advice would take more than a little time. Moreover, the Friedmanite business of privatizing everything from the military to schooling is well underway, and that is the one thing that FDR didn't have to deal with to the same extent. The business of wresting the social contract, shredded and tattered as it may be, from the military-industrial complex is going to be a long hard slog. They've had time to make the populace forget the lessons learned, and time to build up the police state.

That's the main problem in changing the current order, it seems, apart from ignorance and lethargy; the unfortunate problem is that the people running things have made elections into a sideshow, and learned well how to rig the elections to get the end they want. However, the biggest problem with that is that money will only be able to do so much. It won't give you a broader outlook, it doesn't make you understand that really, you aren't all that special and that you don't have all the answers. It also doesn't give you the understanding that you can't fix everything with money, especially if you haven't been supporting the education of all those inferior people who might have the solutions needed. The environment is a mess, and the PTB are busy ruining what's left. The problem is that we are running full force into an environmental nightmare, where the sea and the land and the air will not be able to support us, and unless we fix it, the people with money are going to be just as desperate-and as dead-as the rest of us.

[mother earth]

12. Well said, PDJane. I find myself becoming a socialist democratic, like Bernie Sanders, more and

more each day. I feel privatizing is evil for some things like health care, education and banking...there's far too much wiggle room to leave these issues to be abused. We've had enough of the fox guarding the henhouse. Excellent point re: the environment. People need to hear these truths.

[just1voice]

13. Not a regular but I'll share my ideas, it'll collapse again for sure

but the collapse will be the best thing that could happen for most of the world. The few big banks that dominate global finance are criminal organizations, they defraud every person and country they can, misrepresenting their so-called investments. As the "investments" prove worthless as they do over and over again, all the criminal banks do is issue even more of them using the money the government has "bailed them out" with and provided to them with zero interest loans. This has led to the criminal banks being much larger than they were before the 2008 collapse enabling them to commit the same crimes of fraud on a larger scale.

This was all known prior to their bailouts too, criminals can't be reformed by giving them more money and opportunity to commit the same crimes again. So logically, the U.S. markets, all of them, will collapse again when the big banks that finance between 70% to 90% of daily trading here go bankrupt. All that has occurred over the last 4 years is a constant financial reinforcement of the criminal banks, the banks have not and will not change their fraudulent activity with the mere threat of financial penalties equaling less than 1% of what they make on their frauds.

The evidence is all there: the libor rate rigging, muni bond rigging in all 50 states, real estate fraud/robo signing and foreclosures, market manipulation in all stock, bond and commodity markets, defrauding investors by speculating against the very same investments they sell, media manipulation, insider trading, defrauding countries with "bailouts", insurance fraud, derivatives fraud. The entire financial system is corrupted, "the game is rigged" as Elizabeth Warren said.

It's just a matter of time before it collapses again. The markets will be shut down for a few weeks, like after 9/11, so they can be restructured. The biggest criminals will try like hell to get whatever piece of the pie they can get, just like they all did when Lehman Brothers collapsed. But the big banks will be feeding on themselves and that's a good thing for all of us.

[mother earth]

15. They certainly have been criminal, and as of yet have not been made accountable. This is something

I hoped is addressed in the debates.

Interesting take, thanks, just1voice. May it, indeed, be the beginning of a nationalized system that cannot be corrupted by the greed of a few. Elizabeth Warren is a good woman, I hope Brown is looking for a job himself after her election.

[elleng]

14. 'Suggestions from leading economists' won't be worth a damn.

We NEED a Democratic Congress.

Everyone should support and contribute to these:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=88984

[mother earth]

17. Hell, yeah, we need a sweep!

[Blanks]

19. It would be tough for any politician to muster the support to...

Resort to FDR measures. I think that if we don't take steps soon to deal with the negative influence of money on politics, the environment and our social safety net; there will be revolution.

We've had some practice runs on revolution; the tea party thought they were being revolutionary, the occupy movement was an attempt at peaceful revolution.

The most frustrating thing to me is that all of the factories are out there. All of the means of production are still in existence; they are under the control of people who don't want things to improve (for us). What we need, that we are not getting, is leadership. This is supposed to be a representative government, but the politicians don't represent 'the people' they represent the donors.

It doesn't make sense that we have empty homes and excess food and people are homeless, faced with homelessness, and hungry.

We need to inventory our resources and figure out a way for people to be productive without 'having a job.' Once a house is built, it doesn't take much work to keep it livable. The sun and rain are the primary contributors to food growth; sure you need fertilizer, but fertilizer can come from many sources. We need programs where we teach our young people to take care of themselves; which includes understanding what it takes to grow food.

We need to have homes that produce electricity for the grid, as the only income a family needs. Nobody is going to give us these things; we are going to have to stand together and fight for them.

The veterans of WWI marched on Washington; they had a retired marine general named Smedley Butler that (kind of) led them. This is the kind of revolution that it is going to take to get people to wake up.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

Either things will improve for the working class or the working class should rise up, but if we don't all stand together on one or two issues; we're just too easy to ignore.

[mother earth]

22. Thank you, Blanks. We once had a democracy that represented us, this is no longer true.

[bemildred]

21. I think we are in the early stages of a recovery.

The larger, structural problems we have, that depends on the outcome of the election, the outcome in congress specifically. If Congress decides to do something, anything could happen. Otherwise, not.

[westerebus]

23. In the event of a train wreck, where does one begin?

Last edited Fri Sep 14, 2012, 10:16 AM - Edit history (1)

Treat the wounded and bury the dead. Clear the track. Investigate the cause and prosecute those responsible.

To date, the wounded are ignored. The dead still among us. The wreck remains on the track.

I'll go out on a limb here and presume I know who is responsible, that said, there is no political solution available.

As to where this is all going?

Mrs. Lincoln how did you like the play?

Sums it up well enough.

I'll add, to assure those who will misread the Mrs. Lincoln question. The question reflects the absurdity of such a monumental loss.